


Just a Step Away From the Edge of a Fall (Caught Between Heaven and Hell)

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-05-18 01:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14842860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: They walk up the subway stairs, their arms looped around each other for support, this man who fell from heaven, and this girl who is not quite human and not quite angel, but something altogetherother— and they turn their faces towards the sunlight.





	1. Chapter 1

When they ripped the wings from his flesh, the skin there tore _open_ , leaving behind great swatches of blood that pooled up around the exposed muscle and bone. He’d sunk to his knees, choking on feathers, at first unable to grasp the grotesque enormity of something that once belonged to his body, and now, no longer did. 

He was thrown violently through the clouds. He fell for what seemed like years, the wind in his face, a roaring in his ears, the ground hurtling upwards at him, everything a blur of blue and green and brown and _sky_ … so much sky it felt infinite. 

It was evening. The sun was a huge ball of red fire, illuminating the ground in bursts of bloody colors.

He tries not to remember. But when he does — what he remembers most, is the weightless sensation of falling.

———-

Kylo Ren hungrily scours the bevy of blondes seated at the hightops of his bar, his eyes landing on one woman in particular. Her silver, sequined tank dips obscenely low, just above her belly button. Blond bangs slice jagged and frosty across a high forehead. Her eyes are kohl-black lined and sinister, her lips painted mauve, as kissable as a car accident. Dangerous, just like him.

But it’s the silver crucifix wrapped around her neck choker that really gives him pause, a perverse reminder of his former life. 

When he smiles at her, he’s careful not to show too much teeth. Humans are stupid, desperately fragile creatures — instinctively drawn to things they know will hurt them. During his brief stint on earth, he’s learned quite a bit about then. Things like: they snort up powders and voluntarily clog their livers with poison. They cut themselves with the sharp edges of things, shoot each other in passionate fits of temper and fall in love with people they know will never, ever love them back … and why? Because they’re not sure if they want to numb themselves or experience some kind of existential awakening through the numbness. Because they’re so desperate to feel something, _anything at all_ — they’re willing to totally manufacture problems and emotions. 

Blondie’s eyes are molten. He can see the whole bar reflected in her pupils. “Hello,” she purrs, pushing a smooth waterfall of hair across immaculately tanned shoulders. “Hello you.”

It’s been fifty years since Kylo was thrown out of heaven, but this hasn’t had any impact on his supernatural powers. All angels, even fallen ones, have unique giftings. Kylo is blessed with the ability to sense and manipulate human emotion — a power which he regularly employs — though it’s not necessary in this case. Blonde girl licks her lips languidly, eye fucking the hell out of him.

“Hi,” he responds, “What’s your name?” 

Blondie gets up from her stool and bends over to pick up her purse. Kylo catches an eyeful of cleavage and a glimmer of pink lace. He thinks of the bed in his apartment upstairs, above the bar. He thinks about how she would taste, about the kind of sounds she would make.

“I’m Annie,” she says. Her smile is blinding. “And you are?”

“The owner of this fine establishment,” Kylo answers, watching for her reaction.

Technically, Kylo co-owns the bar _Heaven and Hell_ with his business partner, Hux, but Annie doesn’t need to know this. 

The two of them had bought the place maybe twelve years ago, first gutting and then custom outfitting it with all of the architectural touches that screamed _disgraced angel_ — everything from huge swatches of black marble and darkly haloed lighting, to gothic winged decor encouraging patrons to snap pictures and share on social media. (Kylo pins up the best Instagrams above the pool table, mostly choosing to showcase the hot girls that press lipsticked kisses across the sea of stencilled wings. _Hey, it’s good for business)._

Annie’s eyes sparkle. “Do you maybe want to go somewhere a little quieter?”

Kylo offers her his arm. “I thought you’d never ask.”

———-

At first, after he Fell, Kylo tried hard to be good, as if in some way, this could possibly atone for his sins. He helped little old ladies cross the street, said his _hail Marys_ , paid his taxes on time, and existed as an exemplary employee at the bank where he worked. He volunteered at soup kitchens on the weekends, tipped generously whenever he went out to eat, and never forgot his _please_ and _thank yous_.

He waited for God to forgive him.

But one year passed. Then two. Then … _five_. Ten.

And something dark and warped and thorny began to take root in Kylo’s heart. He allowed his rage — so carefully banked under layers of martyrdom all these years — to blaze forth. Previously, he’d shied away from manipulating humans, but now, he pushed feelings into their heads, glorying in the way the force of their emotions tore them apart. If anything, it meant that other people hurt besides him. What is it that people say about misery again? Oh yes — _it loves company._

He still remembers the first woman he ever slept with on Earth. It had been the easiest thing in the world to push _lust_ into her cerebereal awareness. Her pupils had dilated. Her body had arched towards his. She smiled — and even through the fugue of wanting, her smile was tinged with tenderness. When she took his hand, her fingers were dry and warm, the little cuticle of nail pale against his skin like a half moon.

He remembers _her_ as the turning point upon which his life had shifted. But the long line of women that came after her have long since blurred in his memory. 

(They are only distractions. If Kylo is going to live forever on this godforsaken planet, then he’s going to need to distract himself in the process.) 

He understands, now — why humans snort powders and clog their organs with poisons and run until their lungs give out. Now he too is lost to the desperate urge to feel something real.

———-

After Annie leaves, Kylo showers, dresses and smokes a joint. Then he goes for a walk.

Manhattan sparkles darkly under a thin veneer of neon signage, bright skyscraper lights and the kind of dim bar lighting that encourages the already-wasted to make bad decisions. _The perfect backdrop for sin and debauchery_ , Kylo thinks, walking past a sake restaurant and a dark haired man leering at a girl already swaying into her Junmai-shu. 

(Almost absently, he sifts _awareness_ into her mind and she jerks upright, suddenly alert). 

Sometimes, he likes to walk because he likes to mess with the minds of mortals. But more often than not, he enjoys the anonymity the city has to offer, especially at night. In New York City, he’s just another random guy wearing too much leather during unseasonable moments. (Though he doesn't sweat normally, not like mortals do). It’s early summer now, the air low-key humid and interspersed with the dank odor of potted plants on fire escapes, the skies hanging low and heavy. 

Kylo plugs in his headphones, pressing play on Poison’s _Fallen Angel_ , bobbing along to the mournful guitar strains. He takes a left off 2nd Avenue, down an eerily darkened 84th Street, ducking into the awning shadow of a former mani-pedi storefront, when something cold jabs sharply into his side. 

“Your money!” a guttural voice rasps, digging the Glock further into Kylo’s shirt, pressing indentations into the skin underneath. “Give me your fucking wallet!”

Kylo raises his hands slowly. He’s unable to contain the smile spreading across his face, delighting in thoughts of how he will make this human _suffer_ , how he will toy with his emotions until he breaks and screams and begs. Or maybe, he should just go the time-efficient route and smash his head into the bricks behind him. Either way — “You’ve picked the wrong person,” he hisses.

The Glock jabs harder into Kylo’s side.

“I said — give me your fucking money!” The man’s voice rises in pitch. Kylo can barely make out the facial features under a hoodie and thick eyebrows. “Now!”

“I don’t think so,” Kylo snarls, gritting his teeth and preparing to do some serious damage. But he never has to, because it’s in this precise moment that the girl appears. 

Smooth as a dance, she vaults out of nowhere, catching Kylo’s assailant’s head neatly with the flat of her palm, and driving it into the brick wall behind them. A cacophony of gunshots ricochet against the sidewalk, but the strange girl only braces herself, heaving the man down with his wrist, and leveraging his own weight against him. Keeping her grip, she drives the point of her elbow into his forearm, eliciting an awful cracking sound. The man yells, and the gun goes clattering onto the ground. Not missing a beat, the girl grabs it and presses it into his neck. 

Kylo is impressed against his will. And then the strange girl doesn’t shoot, but chooses to knock the man out with the butt of his own weapon. He crumples hard, knees hitting the cement first, followed by hips and arms and tangles of leg. 

“You OK?" The girl says, turning to him, barely winded. Kylo locks gazes with the clearest eyes he’s ever seen, devoid of makeup but full of life. Her face is all cheekbones. In the darkness, he just sees shadowy angles, no details. She’s wearing a pair of hip-slung jeans and a clingy black tank like a weapon, like something sleek and lithe, femme-fatale-ish. In her hands, the gun is transformed into a seduction accessory. 

“I'm fine.” Kylo thinks of the blonde girl back at the bar, the one whose name he can no longer remember. _Hello you_. Something tight lodges in his chest and sinks claws into the harpsichord bones of his ribs, a sharp wire catching hold. (Of what, he doesn’t know yet. He just feels the catch). “I’m Kylo. Pleased to meet you. I’ve never met a real-life ninja before.”

The girl pockets the gun without smiling. “I’m Rey. You can thank my Krav Maga lessons.”

When he doesn’t say anything for a few seconds in lieu of staring at her, she says, a little frostily, “I believe the correct response to this situation is _thank you_.”

A ribbon of light slices down the street, a cab flowing past like a single pulse of golden blood within the city’s concrete heart. Above them, the sky is a huge slab of painted black strokes. 

Kylo stares at the sliver of bare stomach between Rey’s jeans and tank, his chest emptying. “Thank you,” he chokes out, struggling for air. “But you didn’t have to help. I had everything under control.”

“Oh. You did?” Rey cocks her head. “Clearly, I misread the situation.”

Kylo’s chest lurches. “Do you get off on rescuing random pedestrians? Or do you have an actual day job?”

She half smiles at him, an ironic, semi-disgusted expression, but he feels it in an almost scientific way, like an electromagnetic wave, disturbing something within him on a particle level. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

He _would_ , actually. 

She bends over to check the fallen assailant’s pulse. God fucking damnit, that tank is _sheer_. Kylo is dizzy with the raw force of his own desire. Here on earth, he’s privy to the same violent emotional spikes that humans experience, something which he's become desensitized to over time, but this feels … different. New. Beyond mere lust, he’s curious about the strange girl who’d heedlessly jumped on top of an armed attacker to protect someone she didn’t even know.

 _Rey_ , he wants to tell her, _I’m almost 300 years old. And in all those years, no one’s ever tried to save me. Only you_.

“We should report the theft to the police,” Rey is saying. “I checked his ID; his name’s Hunter Thompson.”

Kylo says, “First, would you want to grab coffee with me? Or a drink, or your favorite kind of food, or whatever. It’s the least I can do.”

Rey just looks at him, hazel eyes narrowed. He’s careful to keep his eyes steady on her face. “What, right now?”

“I know it’s late. But I just thought …” He spreads his arms in supplication.

Rey bites her bottom lip between her teeth. He watches the fragile skin of her mouth pop and twist underneath those sharp canines. Then she shakes her head, abruptly making a decision. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t. I have a ….”

He hears _boyfriend_ underneath everything she doesn’t say. 

_“Please,”_ Kylo tries. 

He probes her mind gently, pushing the faintest tremors of _comfort_ and _happiness_ through her consciousness — or at least he tries. He’s met with what feels like a steel wall in her head. Stunned, he pushes against it, throwing the whole weight of his power behind his actions. Usually, this kind of emotional force is detrimental to humans, but Rey only scowls.

“What the fuck. I save your life and now you’re hitting on me? _Men.”_ There’s a wealth of disgust in her voice, hinting at a long timeline of pain in dealings with the opposite sex. 

Breath hisses out between Kylo’s teeth. “What _are_ you?” he whispers. 

She’s instantly offended. “Excuse me?”

Kylo doesn’t know how to explain that there is no possible way a human can resist angelic powers without the aid of supernatural forces. “I didn’t mean to offend,” he amends, “I only mean that I’m curious about you. I’d like to get to know the girl who saved my life.”

“Yeah, well take that up with my fiancé.” _Ouch_. This time there’s no hesitation in Rey’s syntax. “See you around, I guess. Try to stay safe next time.”

Kylo watches her walk away.


	2. Chapter 2

At night, Rey dreams of a room full of corpses — waxy, sunken bodies perched on moth-bitten sofas, staring at her expressionlessly while they whisper about her flaws.

It takes her a minute to realize they’re all her ex-boyfriends.

 _She never loved me_ , her third-grade crush Eric Laswell accuses, shaking back a fringe of sun-colored bangs. 

_She wouldn’t have sex with me_ , says her high-school boyfriend, Ty Henderson, pouting mournfully underneath a baseball cap. When Rey remembers him now, she thinks of his warm truck bed, and of red solo cups littering a drunken path from kitchen to bedroom. He’d only been an experiment for her, one she hadn’t wanted to admit to until after she’d broken up with him.

 _That’s because she wanted me_ , Greg Underwood smirks — which is mostly true. Rey’d had a crush on Greg for almost all of high school, fantasizing over his dark hair, brooding eyes and low-slung black jeans that always showcased a little bit of hip and chiseled stomach. They’d kissed once, at a party: a slow lip-to-lip contact that involved too much teeth, and tongue, and slobber. Disgusted, Rey had reflexively bitten the inside of her cheek. She remembers how her mouth had tasted like beer and copper, for days afterwards. 

_She was afraid of me_ , Mike Peirano says quietly. 

Even in death, his eyes are a guileless blue, the color of a bright, cloudless sky over water, the greatest irony of all. How could someone with so much darkness inside him have such clear eyes? Six months into big city living, Rey had barricaded herself in a closet to get away from Mike, biting down on her fist to keep from screaming. He’d found her eventually though, broken down the door, and battered her so badly that she hadn’t been able to see out of her left eye for a week.

Rey is just mustering up the courage to look Mike in the face when the room fills with a sudden, explosive beam of light, and the corpses scatter like cockroaches. Rey sees a pair of enormous feathered wings: black as night, soft as sin. Each feather seems to exhale like a sigh, rippling in the air, moving in tandem with her breath. 

The wings are attached to a body. The body turns. Rey falls to her knees —

— And stares up into the blackest, deepest eyes she’s ever seen. It’s the man from tonight, the one she rescued from the attempted mugging. _Kylo_. 

“Up on your feet,” he tells her softly. She can’t stop staring at the planes of his face, at those eyes that go on and on and on, at the pitch colored hair falling in waves across his forehead. He is magnificent, bright-burning, so inhumanly beautiful it should be criminal. Heat rolls off him in waves, emanating from the mass of glowing feathers, surging forward to meet the answering warmth in her belly. 

When she doesn’t respond, his mouth tips sideways. “Unless you’d like to stay down there on your knees? No complaints here.”

———-

Rey wakes up with a gasp, the sheets tangled around her ankles, sweat prickling along the pressure points of her spine. Her fingers dig into the empty spaces of the bed, instinctively seeking out heat and flesh and warmth. “Finn?”

“Huh?” he moans groggily. One hand is flung up above his eyes. He’s snoring, sprawled out the same way a child does, all limbs and awkward angles. “Whassamatter?”

“I had a bad dream,” Rey whispers, even though it wasn’t _bad_ , exactly. She thinks about the way Kylo’s eyes had burned, the way he’d stood between her and everything she’d buried on her way to becoming who she is now. It reminds her of a line from a Ruu Campbell song, interspersed between all the sadness and synth, the singer’s voice like rain and raw silk, singing, _like the first day when I saw you, my past was gone._

Finn is snoring again. Rey prods him with her index finger. He makes a strangled sound low in his throat and violently twists the covers away from her. 

“Oh that’s great,” Rey snaps at her sleeping fiancé. “Thank you so much for protecting me.” Not that she subscribes to that line of thinking, anyway. She’s a big believer in dealing with her own distress, something that led her to taking Krav Maga self-defense classes after her failed relationship with Mike, something which had led her … straight to Kylo, apparently.

Rey slips out of bed and pads softly to the bathroom to wash her face. Her reflection swims in the mirror: freckles, waves of static-y brown hair and wild, wide eyes. A single drop of water glints down her cheek like a teardrop. 

She met Finn at work, one of the few straight guys on the marketing floor. It had been a full year since Mike, but back then, she still shuddered herself to sleep most nights and flinched violently away from normal human contact. 

Finn had been standing near the scanner, swearing softly under his breath as the machine beeped and sighed in confusion. 

Rey had laughed. “Like _this_ ,” she’d shown him, punching in the correct keypad code and turning the paper upside down. It was a press release for Axe products.

Finn had looked askance at her, her face aglow in the soft blue light from the scanner. “Thank you,” he’d smiled, and it was lopsided. “Apparently, technology and I are in engaged in a constant power struggle.”

“A common cultural theme I think," Rey tapped a finger against her bottom lip, "Well, according to _Terminator_ I mean.” The air between them shifted subtly. Finn’s fingers brushed hers — and it was the first time someone’s gentle touch didn’t immediately trigger thoughts of another, more violent contact. 

With a sharp burst of exhilaration, Rey realized that she wasn’t afraid of him.

This is what she holds onto in her heart, now. She holds onto that first memory of Finn at the copier, and a thousand sweeter memories of him that came after: soft kisses in the hazy city rain, mornings on the couch, his hand on her back while she was sick after a night of drinking, his careful consideration of her problems while she bitched about office politics. 

Rey loves Finn. He is good man. He is a safe choice for her. He is comfortable. She knows that he will never, ever hurt her. She is just not sure that these are the unshakeable foundations upon which lasting marriages are built.

———-

“So?” Kylo drums his fingers along the black-marbled countertop and regards Hux with opaque eyes. “What’d you find out?”

Hux is typing away furiously on his laptop, his red hair standing on end from where he has run his fingers through it too many times. Hux is one year away from getting his PhD at Columbia University, something which Kylo finds endlessly entertaining: a fallen angel, toiling away at something as mundane as human education. 

But Hux eats organic avocadoes from Trader Joe’s and cried during the _Game of Thrones_ episode that saw Ned Stark beheaded and little Arya and Sansa lost and defenseless. He’s a full two centuries older than Kylo, with softer edges, a deeply buried temper, and a determination to embrace the more human aspects of life. He even encouraged Kylo to take a writing class one semester. _It’ll be good for you_ , he counseled, _it’ll steer you away from the sleazy crowd you seem so hellbent on embracing._

 _Haha, hellbent_ , Kylo had grinned, overcome with the irony of language.

But Hux’s eyes, still gold-rimmed around the edges in a way that humans’ eyes never could be, had narrowed. _Kylo, this is important._

And so Kylo had taken a writing class, where he’d learned all about Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and the disillusionment of the great American dream. He’d been tasked with writing a creative short story, only two weeks in, where he’d chosen to embrace a girl-meets-boy troupe, complete with a happily-ever-after ending. All along the margins, the professor had written in red ink, _what about conflict? Where is the pain and suffering that’s emblematic of real life?_ And so Kylo had written a second draft, where the girl was a serial killer, who’d chopped the boy up and hid his body parts in between the walls of her Chelsea apartment. Then she washed the blood off her hands and returned to her job as fashion model, walking the catwalks from Paris to Milan to New York and back again.

 _Very American Psycho of you_ , the professor had noted, _but next time, try to dig a little deeper. What did the girl and the boy talk about before she killed him? Behavior is deterministic, so what was the motive? What drives this girl? Did she suffer some great childhood trauma?_

In short, one semester was enough to convince Kylo he wasn’t cut out for higher education. He contented himself with mixing Manhattans and learning secondhand chemistry anecdotes off of Hux. Things like: radium is a beautiful, fluorescent chemical, but if you ingest enough of it, it goes straight to your bones, decaying you from the inside out. 

Now, Hux looks up at Kylo, his blue eyes shot through with irritation. “What do you mean, what did I find out?”

“From following Rey,” Kylo supplies, equally irritated. “What did you find out about Rey?”

Hux leans back in the chair and cracks his knuckles. Columbia University has a host of incredible libraries, with any number of cozy study nooks. The Upper East Side also boasts intimate coffee shops on almost every block — but for reasons unknown to Kylo, Hux prefers to study at their bar, _Heaven and Hell_. He likes the dim lighting during the daytime, before patrons are allowed in, and sometimes he has a glass of whiskey while he reads about lonsdaleite, which forms when meteorites smash themselves into Earth. 

“Do we need to talk about your completely unfounded and unhealthy interest in this mortal girl? Why don’t you just fuck her like you do almost every other female that walks into your path? Work some of the obsession out of your bloodstream.”

“Shut up,” Kylo snaps, his temper already fraying for reasons unknown to him. “Just tell me what you learned.”

Hux pushes his laptop to the edge of the table. “She works at a public relations company in Soho. She lives on the Upper West side, on Columbus and 76th.”

“That’s it?”

Hux is far, far better at tailing people than Kylo is. Maybe it stems from his age or from almost two lifetimes spent on Earth, but either way, Kylo will never forget the day that Hux dropped from the skies in front of him, his unglamored wings bursting into fire and light. He’d been following Kylo for days, yet Kylo had never once sensed his presence. That had been over fifty years ago, and the two of them had been friends ever since, though it was less of an actual friendship and more of a relationship borne of necessity. 

Hux raises his eyebrows. “Why don’t we just skip to the part of this where you tell me what you really want to know.”

“Does she really have a fiancé?”

“That’s your first question? Great, OK,” Hux blows out a deep breath. Even a few feet away, Kylo can smell the alcohol on his breath, razor sharp. “She lives with a guy, so yes, I would assume that’s her fiancé.”

Something surges in Kylo, an upward twisting, all of himself winding towards the sky with an awful torque that demands immediate release. It is something utterly foreign to him, he who has spent years fending off lipsticked girls who begged for second chances with everything they had to offer: their eyes, their voices, their bodies. “What does he look like?”

Hux’s eyes are even and still, the timbre of his voice even more so. “I’m not answering that, Kylo. Stop being a child. Next question.”

“What clients does she work on?”

Hux’s attention returns to his laptop, as if now, he has determined the danger is past. “Hennessy. Another liquor client. And food clients. A couple restaurants in the city, I think.”

Kylo’s earlier rancor vanishes. He could almost rub his hands together with glee. “Excellent.”

Hux’s mouth thins. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but whatever it is — it’s a bad idea. This is not going to go the way you think it is.”

“And why do you say that?”

Hux’s chin juts, a sure sign he is deciding whether or not to say something he’d rather not reveal. “You were right about this girl. She’s not normal.”

Above Hux’s head, a glass shelf lined with bottles glints dully in the darkly. From down here, it looks like nerve impulses, a slew of neon lights firing into the darkness of the bar. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she sensed me following her for starters, so there’s that.”

“And she’s impervious to my powers of persuasion,” Kylo muses, his heart throwing itself desperately against the constrictive bars of his ribcage with sudden emotion. “Do you think she’s one of us?” If so, that would explain away everything: his bizarre pull to a mortal, the weird current he’d sensed dancing between the two of them, the way he hadn’t been able to sleep at night thinking about the girl who’d jumped on top of an attacker to save him. 

Outside the bar, the sun is beginning to fall from its perch high up in the sky. It’s late afternoon, the shadows expanding and opening, dark blue, bruised colors coming to replace the brightness of day.

“No,” Hux taps his chin with his finger. “I would have sensed if she was like us. But whatever she is — she’s not fully human.”


	3. Chapter 3

On Thursday morning, Rey sleeps through the alarm, the cacophony of garbage trucks, and the dulcet strains of the Revivalists’ _Wish I Knew You_. Finn strips the covers in a fit of panic and resorts to a combination of both caffeine bribery and thinly veiled pleading to get her out of bed. _What has been going on with you lately_ he asks her on the subway, in between Times Square and Bryant Park, while she leans blearily against a pole. 

“Insomnia,” Rey mumbles, wisely deciding not to tell him that she’s been dreaming of a black winged angel for four nights straight. She read somewhere that dreams are subconscious manifestations of suppressed desires. _So exactly what kind of deep-seated issues superimpose angel wings onto the shoulders of a man she met for three seconds?_

At work, she re-reads the same email four times without actually digesting it. Then she tidies a desk drawer which doesn’t need to be tidied and goes for her third coffee run in under an hour. At 10AM, the Hennessy team holds a weekly internal meeting to make things up that they can talk about. Rey stares wearily around the circle of desk chairs, at the women with variously coiffed versions of hair mimicking Rihanna’s _Umbrella_ stage. Chokers encircle skinny necks, jagged bangs slice across tanned foreheads, contoured lips pout prettily. One of the prerequisites for working in PR involves the ability to put yourself together, and Rey has no idea how she managed to slip through the cracks. She is mostly focused on opening her eyes in the morning and moving her legs throughout the day, and eating enough food to continue doing so. Adding too much else contributes to her emotional workload. 

“Hi ladies,” Joanna Bernstein says, crossing her ankles in lieu of her legs. Crossing your legs gives you varicose veins, or so Rey’s been told. “I have a surprise for you. Tonight, we’re going to happy hour at one of the hottest bars in town, _Heaven and Hell_.”

Rachel Rosander and Karen Jackson immediately interject with a chorus of to-dos — _tonight is date night with Jon; tonight I’m supposed to meet my sister for drinks at the Smith_ — but Joanna only claps her hands, effectively cutting off all conversation. “No, I don’t want to hear it. Clear your schedules because this is a mandatory outing. This is a prospective client meeting.” Her eyes linger on Rey in a way that makes her wonder if she has a stain on her shirt. _It wouldn’t be the first time_. “Now, shall we talk about what’s trending in the news cycle this morning? Anything of interest to share in the F &B space?”

Rhi, short for Rhiannon, so named because of her parents’ unhealthy obsession with Fleetwood Mac, mentions that frosé popsicles are trending around warmer weather. Meredith Sussman brings up the concept of plant-based protein. _With more and more chefs embracing tofu and quinoa_ , she says, _veganism, is on the rise._

Joanna is nodding. “Interesting stuff, ladies. Rey — anything from you?”

Apparently, there is a pencil in her pocket, because Rey has accidentally stabbed herself with it, and now feels a sharp pain in the ring finger of her left hand. “Booze,” she grasps blindly, “is always popular. Particularly in the summertime. Particularly among human beings.”

Joanna skewers her with a gaze full of both venom and grudging admiration. Joanna modeled for five years in her early twenties and it shows — in her pettiness, her eating habits and her expertly applied eyeliner. Some models look different in person than they do on the set of VS ads: a little shorter, or bustier or heavier, more relatable without the glare of the camera lens on them. Joanna is not one of these people.

“Let’s see a little bit of effort from you moving forward please, Rey,” she says. “Our prospective client has asked for you by name, which I find intriguing, since you’re not typically one to bring in new business opportunities.”

 _Ouch_. “Who is the client?” Rey blurts out. 

Joanna consults her clipboard. “You’ll find out tonight, won’t you?”

———-

At _Heaven and Hell_ , a line snakes around the block, full of girls stamping their feet in Jimmy Choos, while bouncers stalk up and down, barking threats at anyone who tries to cut the queue.

Rey falters, intimidated. “Um. I have a …”, she tries, but Joanna only grabs her arm, looking determined, and knocks on a side door. She has smeared a bloody, vampiric slash across her lips that almost passes for lipstick, and inserted some kind of dried red flower into her updo, which is several shades whiter than normal blond hair, though the coloring works for her. Most things work for her — being a former supermodel helps you pull off the trends normal people struggle with, like rompers. And overalls. And chokers. And those god-awful Yeezy heels, the ones with the clear plastic backs.

The door opens. 

“Really,” Rey tries again, weakly, “I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t know anyone at this establishment.” Joanna ignores her; Meredith and Rhi trail behind the two of them like ducklings waddling after a goose. Rey walks into a concrete hallway that opens up into a haze of subterranean, murky lighting. Voices pulse through the wall, the air smelling of liquor and sweat and cologne and dry ice. An electric chandelier hangs overhead, vibrating softly with the tidal wave of distant music. Rey looks upward to a violent arch of black wings stencilled across the entire ceiling, draping across the framework to end in perfectly defined feathers. She remembers her recurring dream, thinks of the angel that stared her down with burning eyes.

A bar of dying sunlight illuminates a high top table in the corner where two men are sitting across from each other, deep in conversation. 

“But what are you looking for,” the man on the left is asking. He’s casually handsome, the way that pretty boys who grow up into attractive men tend to be, this one sporting floppy blonde hair, carefully maintained stubble and crinkly blue eyes that give off an _aw shucks_ vibe. “What do you want?”

Joanna makes a noise, low and deep in her throat, to announce their arrival in the room. It sounds like this: _ahuhuhhmhmh._

The other man turns towards them.“I just know I’m looking for something very particular. I’ll know it when I see it. Oh wait. I just saw it.”

Rey lets out a semi-audible gasp.

Kylo is looking right at her, his grin a lazy sprawl across his face. _That smile could be famous_ , she thinks, _even without the body attached to it._

———-

Once, during one of his soberer moments, Rey’s abusive ex-boyfriend Mike told her a story. She had been lying on the bed with her head in his lap, while he smoked a joint and lazily stroked the strings of his Fender Strat. There was an acrid burn behind her throat and a wreath of gray above her eyes.

The story went like this:

Back in the ‘80s, Nikki Sixx, the bassist for Mötley Crüe, was addicted to heroin. He styled his black hair in thick, aggressive spikes and painted his eyes to match. He wore enough leather to paper over the problems of a small town, and he performed in front of a hundred thousand people, and in his free time, he stuck needles into his body and wrote songs about the way they made him feel. 

At one point, Motley Crue was part of the Guns N’ Roses tour, and Nikki was shooting up heroin in Slash’s hotel room when he suffered a drug overdose. Supposedly, Slash wasn't in the room at time, but Slash’s girlfriend was — and she called 911. By the time the ambulance got there, Nikki was blue and barely breathing. En route to the hospital, Nikki was actually declared dead for two minutes, although the paramedics were able to revive him with a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. 

(Later, when he woke up in the hospital,he ripped the tubes out of his nose, kicked the panes of glass out the window and climbed two stories down. Once home, the first thing he did was shoot up more heroin).

That’s the story that inspired Mötley Crüe’s hit song, _Kickstart my Heart_.

———-

Rey does not do drugs, and she avoids any kind of lifestyle that can be deemed rock n’ roll-esque. She has never identified with that story or with Nikki Sixx in any way. At least not until now, when she first sees Kylo — and her heart starts throwing itself desperately against her rib cage, beating out the beginnings of a violent melody, pounding out a bloody, raw, rhythmic tambor.

She thinks, _kickstart my heart, indeed_.

———-

“Well this is a coincidence, isn’t it?” Kylo grins at her, his teeth a slash of pure white. “Fancy seeing you again.”

Rey is unimpressed. “What is this? What is going on here?”

Kylo can’t stop staring at her, drinking her in. There are other girls in the room too, grouped in loose pockets of space, but for all he cares, the two of them may be the last people left alive in the whole world. “Like I said, coincidence.”

“Not really,” Rey arches an eyebrow, breath hissing through her teeth. “Something tells me you planned this.”

Tonight, Rey is wearing her hair up, messy dark tendrils slicked across her forehead and cascading over her ears. The other girls standing around her are heavily made up: faces bruised with makeup, plastic lips, dyed hair, fake boobs. In contrast, Rey’s eyes are bare and raw and rippled with emotion, her skin clean and clear, a silvered scar splicing from her clavicle up the left side of her neck. _What happened there?_

“I don’t plan,” Kylo scoffs, the nonchalance a knee-jerk reaction for him. “Shall we?” He gestures for the other girls to sit down at a high top table, his hand lowering to the small of Rey’s back. Underneath his fingers, her body jumps expressively. He can feel the heat of her skin burning through her brown leather dress. 

Joanna — the only woman whose name he remembers, and only because of their earlier conversations, smiles at him over the rim of a glass filled with dark amber liquid. “So, Mr. Ren…”

“Please, call me Kylo.”

“Kylo, then.” 

He brushes the edges of her subconscious carefully, trailing through her feelings of lust and desire and confusion and fear. Then he tries reaching out to Rey and is met with a literal steel wall, cemented hundreds of feet tall and topped with barbed wire. He gives that wall a mental push. Nothing. She meets his frustrated half glance with a subtle arch of her eyebrows. 

A thrill races along his veins. _What the actual fuck?_

“I have to admit, Kylo, this is a bit unorthodox. Usually, when we take on a new client, there’s a pitch involved and we’ll put together a plan and draw up a scope and …”

Kylo cuts off her babble with a wave of his hand. “I want to work with your team, no convincing needed. The caliber of your work speaks for itself.”

“Thank you,” Joanna is visibly flattered, her cheeks pinkening. The other girls from the agency mirror her facial expressions to varying degrees. Only Rey remains unimpressed, looking at him like he’s full of bullshit. Which he is. 

“My condition,” he continues smoothly, “is that I want Rey as my day-to-day POC.”

Joanna looks like she’s swallowed a lemon. “We can certainly have Rey on your team, but there’s a protocol in place. We can put an org chart together and share back with you as early as tomorrow morning …”

Kylo leans forward, his eyes glittering. “Isn’t the first rule of marketing to keep your client happy? Well, this is what will make me happy. Is it a question of money? I’ll pay whatever you want.”

Joanna is totally thrown. Her gaze swivels between Kylo and Rey and back again. “Uh — “

Rey’s mouth is crystalline hard, her eyes sharp as shards of glass. “Kylo, can I talk to you for a minute?”

He’s amused, one arm thrown across the back of his chair in a position of forced casualness that’s fooling no one. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

Her face looks like it's been sculpted from glass. _“Alone.”_

———-

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rey asks him bluntly, away from the table, away from Joanna and Meredith and Rhi, whose eyes she still can feel burning holes in her back. “What’s going on here?”

Kylo cocks his head. “I want your agency to do PR for the bar. Why is that so hard to understand?”

“No.” Rey’s heart is still hammering against her ribs, the beat slower and sluggish now. “Why do you want me to be so involved? I have a fiancé, you know. I’m not interested in you … _that way_. I rescued you from a mugger _one time_. It could have happened to anyone, not just you, so get over it. It’s not a big deal, so abandon this crazy stalker mission, or I’ll .. I’ll call the police, I’ll get a restraining order…”

“Rey.” Kylo’s voice is unexpectedly gentle. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not ever going to hurt you.”

She looks at him, straight into his liquid eyes, and she believes him, even though she’s not sure why. Before, in the darkness, she thought his eyes were just black, but now she sees the dimension in them. His eyes are hot and full of light and they are all over her. Protectively, she crosses her hands across her chest. “OK,” she says. “So this really is just a business opportunity. A coincidence that you happened to meet me beforehand?”

“Sure,” he tells her, very carefully. “If that’s what you want it to be.”

When she doesn’t respond to that, he says, “I just want to get to know you better. I’m curious about you.”

She can’t imagine why; there’s not much to her. Peel back the pages of her life and you’ll find a yawning arc of loneliness and desire. Isn’t that true of everyone? She only responds, “This is my career, and I don’t want you fucking with it.”

“Ah,” he says. “So I take it PR is your higher calling, then? What you live and breathe for?”

That strikes a nerve. She keeps her head down and her breathing even, determined not to let it show, but he still _knows_ , goddamn him, and he pounces. “So there is something else, then. What do you care about, Rey? What gives you hope and life and strength and reason for being?”

It’s too much too fast. This man has no sense of personal boundaries. He goes from zero to one hundred in the span of mere seconds. “My fiancé, of course.”

“Liar.” His breath brushes her cheek. “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to convince me.”

Rey thinks of the pages back in her apartment, of the illustrations she has yet to submit anywhere. The graphic novel she’s working on is called _City of Stars_ , and it takes place in New York City. The main character is a shapeshifter, and she uses her power to fight demons in the subway tunnels, of which there is an endless supply. In between her supernatural battles, she shapeshifts herself into other people’s lives and other people’s identities: a barista at a hipster coffee bar in Brooklyn, an angry rockstar who sleeps with a different girl every night of the week but can’t ever remember their names, a little girl who lives in Queens and watches snow melting and waits for spring.

Her artwork is her heart, her dream. She struggles to talk about it even to Finn; she can’t imagine how she will tell Kylo. But then she surprises herself, because she does. 

“My art,” she snaps out, and watches his eyes go soft. 

He has a way of looking at her that gives her chills, and she hates that. She feels like it’s a betrayal to Finn, sweet Finn, who texted her that he ordered Chinese takeout and left a cartoon of stir fry in the fridge for her whenever she gets home. 

“Please,” Kylo tells her, “Please say you’ll work with me.”

“As long as you understand the boundaries. There can be no more of this,” she gestures between the two of them. “We have to have a working relationship.”

Kylo holds up both hands. “I promise to behave.”

She doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t know what kind of man he is yet, only that he is not the kind of man who behaves.


	4. Chapter 4

“So,” Rey begins, carefully, “what would you say your vision is for this bar, and for your brand?”

It is two days later. Rey is wearing a floaty approximation of a blue patterned skirt with a black blouse and delicate layered necklaces. It is ninety seven degrees outside. She'd been warm earlier, but all that body heat turned to ice the second she walked into the bar. Kylo has the AC cranked up so high that she asked for a sweatshirt, and he keeps smirking every time he looks at the _Hellcats_ logo scrawled across the front of it. Kylo’s business partner is here too — a tall red-headed guy named Hux, who lopes around with the same sort of lazy grace that Kylo does. Both of them seem highly entertained by her. They keep exchanging loaded looks, and she keeps tapping her pen along the marble-edged countertop to get their attention. 

“Well I guess we’d say that we’re an exclusive, sophisticated, suave place,” Hux says, in response to her pen-tapping. “We aim to attract the beautiful people of the city, but we’re also not ostentatious. No splashy bottle service, no trashy celebrities.”

“Uh-huh.” Rey writes down _beautiful people, not trash_ on her clipboard. “And if your brand had a face, who would you want? In an ideal world?”

 _Brad Pitt_ Hux says, at the exact same time Kylo says _Johnny Depp_. When she looks up at him, he’s staring at her. She feels that same strange buzzing in her head that she’s felt around him before. _Maybe the man is giving her migraines_.

“Sexy, but mysterious. Alluring, but with a dark side.”

Rey stops tapping her pen. “You do realize he assaulted his ex-wife Amber Heard?” she demands, unable to keep the quiver from her voice. It may have been years ago; she may be happy now with Finn — but she’ll never forget Mike’s fists on her face. She’ll never forget that night in the closet, never forget the coat hanger she twisted into a weapon, never forget the way she bit down on her fist to swallow the sobs. She’d just found out Mike had been cheating on her, and had come home to confront him. She’d opened her mouth, and the next second, she’d been on the ground staring up at the ceiling. There was blood running down her arm and shattered glass on the ground. Mike’s face was twisted, his mouth only a slash in the darkening, dusky light, and she’d thought, hopelessly, desperately, _all I ever did was love you_. 

She never went to therapy afterwards, never even told anyone but Finn about what happened. She dealt with the aftermath all by herself. When the shakes hit her at night, the fear so paralyzing that she couldn’t sleep — she listened to Dire Straits’ _Brothers in Arms_. She closed her eyes to Mark Knopfler’s soft, raspy voice — _There’s so many different worlds / so many different suns / And we have just one world / But we live in different ones_ — and she pictured a different world, one where nothing could touch her. That was the inception of her first graphic novel. 

The heroine of that work, Caroline, was impervious to the elements, and to normal human emotion. She passed her hand through fire, and the skin came away unburnt. She wore jeans and a T-shirt in the depths of winter, even when snow piled atop the streets and everything was dead and dark. The people she saw crying and laughing at parties confused her. At night, she cooked herself spaghetti and meatballs in a dank apartment devoid of music and light. Until one day, when she walked into a tattoo parlor and asked for a tattoo. _Just here_ , she told the artist, _a name, above my heart_. The name was Hannah, the girl who’d been her best friend in high school before she’d gotten into a car accident and fallen into a coma. Caroline had been the one driving the car, the one who should have died in Hannah’s place. But the second the tattoo needles pierced her flesh, something miraculous happened: Caroline started to cry. And her tears formed into a giant river that washed her away to a land full of purple and blue light, where Hannah stood atop a hill and wrapped her arms around Caroline and said _I forgive you_.

Kylo is staring again. Rey doesn’t like the way he looks at her, the way his eyes sink through her shirt and her skin to the memories contained in her body. He looks at her like he _knows_ what Mike did to her body. His gaze is black and sharp and has _teeth_ and _claws_ — and Hux takes one look at him, and says hurriedly, “OK, no Johnny Depp then. Forget we ever said that.”

Kylo’s face is still shadowed with rage. “Rey,” he asks her, “would you like a drink?”

She starts tapping her pen again. “Now? But we’re working. And it’s the middle of the afternoon. I feel like it wouldn’t be appropriate —”

“Well, I’d really like a drink,” Kylo interrupts. “And it would be great if you had one with me to normalize my midday indulgence.” He slides a glass across the shiny bartop countertop. “What would you like?”

“This is emotional blackmail.”

“Call it what you like.” Kylo is utterly unperturbed, pouring himself something dark red and bubbly in a black goblet. “But I am the client. And your job is to make me happy. What can I get you?”

“My job is to make you happy from a _business_ perspective, not an emotional one,” Rey clarifies, before sighing gustily. “Uh. Pinot Noir, I guess. If you have.”

Kylo pours her a tall glass without comment, and passes it back to her. “I’d like you to tell me about your artwork.”

Rey has just swallowed a mouthful of Pinot, and now she chokes red liquid everywhere. Splotches of wine dot her borrowed sweatshirt and splash across all the marble. “Shit,” she says mournfully, examining the sweatshirt, but Kylo only starts laughing and dabs at the countertop with a damp rag. “It’s alright,” he says, the shadow finally gone from his face. “The sweatshirt’s Hux’s.”

“Oh yeah,” Hux interjects from the corner. “Laugh it up. It’s not like I care about my possessions or anything like that.”

“Sorry.” Mortified, Rey takes it off. Goosebumps sprinkle her bare arms. “I’ll turn down the AC,” Kylo says immediately. “Are you going to tell me about your artwork?”

If she was an animal, all her hackles would be raised. “Sorry, but what does this have to do with work?”

“Nothing. This has to do with me, and what I want.”

At her hesitation, he unexpectedly gentles. “It’s OK, Rey. I promise. I just want to get to know you better.”

“Um,” she blows a gusty breath, examines her ragged nails, “It’s just that I don’t really even talk about this stuff to the people I’m close with, so to tell a complete stranger is a little weird —”

“We’re not strangers though." His grin is so very sharp, she worries she will cut herself alongside the edges of it. Some people get better looking the longer you get to know them, but Kylo’s not one of them. His face is not Hollywood-looking but his liquid eyes are so intense, his cheekbones so perfectly placed, the sheer pull of his face so arresting — Rey can’t look away. “You basically saved my life.”

“Um,” Rey says again. Her face is very red. She can’t get the words _you_ and _saved_ and _life_ , and the order in which he'd used them, out of her head. “It was nothing. Honestly.”

“Rey.” Kylo says.

“OK.” She looks up at the ceiling, at the spread of feathered black wings that swallow the room whole. “I started drawing when I was a kid. I’ve always felt things too deeply. I’ve always been told that I was either _too much_ of something — you know, too emotional, too weak, too moody — or _not enough_ of something else — not rational enough, not logical enough, not strong enough. The only place for all that excess feeling to go was onto a page. I fell in love the first time I put a pencil on a page,” Rey gives a soft, broken laugh. “That drawing was of an earthquake, in California. There was a building, and all the windows were shattered, and something about that struck me, well …” Rey shrugs. “It’s kinda strange. My first ever creation, and it was an image of destruction.”

Kylo is very still. “And are you from California?”

She shrugs. _That_ is a conversation she really does not want to get into. “I’m from all over.”

“OK.” She’s relieved when he lets her comment pass. “And what do you draw now?”

“Graphic novels.” She tells him about her first novel, about Caroline and Hannah, of the blue-purple light at the end, at the way Caroline finally cried when the needles pierced the space above her heart. She tells him about the illustrations she’s working on now: about the superhero who fights demons, and how every demon kill brings her a little closer to a redemptive state. She tells him about how the heroine is lonely, so lonely that she shapeshifts into ordinary humans’ lives, because she wants to feel how they live. She wants to feel something, _anything_ , even if it’s just the mundane restlessness that people suffer through every day of their lives: on the subway, sitting behind a desk, waiting in traffic. 

Kylo is utterly rapt. He watches her with his chin in his hands, unblinking, unmoving. Rey finishes her glass of wine and he pours her another, asks her what medium she likes to create with, whether she likes pen or charcoal, paint or marker. _Charcoal_ , she tells him, _initially, at least, for the first draft. And then I put the rough drawings into Adobe Illustrator and place all the text. And then I do all the final line art and painting in Photoshop._

Kylo turns on the sink in the kitchen. “So in an ideal world, you’d want to be an artist? Instead of doing what you’re doing now?”

“I guess so.” Rey’s head feels very heavy, very pleasantly full of wine. There’s a light buzzing in her ears. 

“So why haven’t you?”

“It’s not that easy.” Rey takes another sip. Her second glass is almost empty. “If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, or anyone who sits behind a desk really, you’re judged on the basis of your work. But if you want to be an artist — anyone who creates anything — you’re judged on whether or not you’re good enough to even enter into that profession. Look at Van Gogh, for instance. Now he’s considered one of the most famous artists of all time; back in his lifetime, everyone thought his paintings were shit. He died alone and penniless; now his art sells for millions. Art is subjective, which is why it means certain things to certain people. That’s why some people listen to Cardi B, and other people listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers. So how do you quantify all of that emotion and experience with a price tag?” She shakes her head. 

Kylo is still watching her. “I'd argue that raw emotion is exactly the thing that labels look for,” he counters. “Too many artists these days are synthed up or auto-tuned, or just wannabe reality stars looking to get their fifteen minutes so they can sell shit on Instagram. But not many people display the depth of feeling you just did,” he reaches out and grazes her cheek with the barest of touches, his fingertips the whisper of a caress over her chin, but she jerks away. Kylo is unbalanced by the sudden movement. The utensil he’s washing under the hot water slips, glass shattering into glittering fragments across the countertops and trickling down the drain. “Fuck,” Kylo murmurs, without any real rancor. Light gleams off the shard of glass embedded in his left palm.

Rey shoots off her stool. "Oh my god. Are you OK?" She moves to his side, taking his palm between her fingers, bracing herself for blood flow, but he wrenches it away from her. 

"It's nothing," he says, his back to her, his head down. Then, "See, look. Nothing."

She looks at his palm. There's no blood, just an expanse of perfect, unmarred skin. He flexes his knuckles. There's a tiny brown freckle near his thumb. His fingernails are jagged and uneven, evidence of a nail biter. "All good. The glass didn't cut me."

She frowns. "But I saw—”

He meets her gaze calmly, his pupils dilated. “I promise, I'm totally fine. No cut. Nothing." When he smiles at her, it _almost_ looks normal. 

“Rey,” Hux’s voice startles her. She and Kylo had been so absorbed in their conversation to one another, she’d forgotten Hux is still here. “It’s time for you to go now.”

“Sure,” Rey stutters. Her head is spinning, trying to make sense of what she just saw. She struggles to get back on even footing. 

“Do you think you can write us up a description of the brand voice we’re looking for?” Hux asks.

Rey clears her throat. “Of course,” she manages. When she was a kid, she loved kaleidoscopes. You could lose yourself behind the black abyss of binoculars that suddenly lit up with a myriad colorful patterns the same way fireworks broke open the sky. Turn a dial and all the colors shifted. _Click_. Red, blue, black diamonds. _Click_. The diamonds turn into squares, turn into circles.

This is a kaleidoscopic moment. She doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not.

“I’ll work with the team to put together a timeline of the kind of events we see you hosting at the bar,” Rey babbles, overcompensating. “Maybe we can get some celebrities photographed in here, something to boost the credibility of the establishment.”

“OK,” Kylo is looking everywhere but at her. “Yes. Thanks. That would be great.”

———-

Kylo watches Rey exit the bar, staring at the way her skirt floats behind her, suddenly diaphanous in the late afternoon sunlight. He’s glad he didn’t tell her that they’ve had celebrities in the bar before, loads of times. Gwyneth Paltrow stops in sometimes, en route to her home in the Hamptons. She’s just as thin and blonde as she looks in real life. She’s tall-ish, but her head only comes up to Kylo’s chest. When he hugs her, he’s careful not to squeeze too tightly. Her bones feel brittle and paper thin.

Hux says, “You are in seriously deep shit where that girl is concerned.”

Kylo replies, “I’m only trying to figure out what she is. I’m trying to protect us.”

Hux shoots him a look that is the furthest thing possible from believing him.

Kylo turns. _Don’t I deserve a little happiness_ , he wants to snap at his only friend, _She makes me feel things; please just let me pretend for one second that I could have this, this, this, whatever this is —_

Hux’s voice is black and ominous, matching the bar’s gothic decor. “Don’t forget how you Fell, Kylo.”


	5. Chapter 5

When Kylo was an angel, God tasked him with overseeing the last moments of the dying. It was supposed to be an honor, but Kylo felt it like a curse — the naked vulnerability with which humans approached death hit him somewhere low and deep, like a punch to his gut, like a bruise on the inside of his ribs when he breathed in. 

Kylo still thinks about the souls of the humans he shepherded away from Earth. He thinks about humans like Brad — who was supposed to go to Harvard, but his mother got cancer and he opted to work in a supermarket deli instead. At night, Brad stabbed his veins full of toxins to help him get through his days spent glowering at customers over slices of glazed maple turkey. He OD’ed on sleeping pills the day after he got the news that his mother’s cancer had metastasized to her brain — and Kylo flew Brad’s body across two highways and under five bridges to First Baptist Hospital, where Mrs. Lewandowski felt the presence of her son’s soul, opened her eyes, and _smiled_. 

After Brad came Leslie, with her J.Crew-level perkiness, her toothpaste-advert smile and her unquenchable desire to conquer every mountain peak. Kylo was with her on Mt. Kilimanjaro, the day her gear jammed and she plummeted a hundred feet down a crevice, shattering all the bones in her left leg in the process. She spent the next two days mostly in and out of consciousness, but on the third day, Kylo revealed himself to her in all of his fire-burnt, winged glory. Leslie’s lips parted. _Oh_ , she breathed, her pain forgotten, her fingertips on his face like a brand, scorching him with her touch, _so beautiful_.

After Leslie, Kylo tailed Craig Silver for a while: in and out of bedrooms, shady hotel rooms and alleyways. Craig worked on Wall Street, wore Hugo Boss and drank lots of dark red liquid in lots of impossibly frosted glasses. Even Kylo, an immortal being, couldn’t keep track of all the women in his life. There was Mel, from work, who wore La Perla underneath her pencil skirt, and Jasmine, Craig’s masseuse, whom he fucked on his office table, and Megan, the twenty-something co-ed he paid to walk his Bernese Mountain dogs. Craig’s wife Lauren found out about the affairs eventually, and started dosing his morning coffee with cyanide. One month later, Kylo stood next to Craig as he choked to death in his own kitchen. _Everything will be OK_ , Kylo whispered to him, calming him, _it will all be OK_.

Only it wasn’t.

One of Heaven’s cardinal rules is the adherence to God’s will. God’s will is perfect, sovereign and just. Once Brad, Leslie and Craig were destined to die, there was nothing Kylo could do to save them; it was God’s will; it was already decreed. All he could do was stand by and shepherd their souls into the next life. 

This is what he thought, anyway. Before Abby. 

Abby hit Kylo the way things are not supposed to, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt of lightning. One second, he was a bored angel wandering around New York City, the next second, his whole world had imploded, leaving him so far adrift in outer space that he was walking on stars. 

Abby Michaelson had the biggest, widest, darkest eyes Kylo had ever seen. He ran into her on accident, in a CVS where he was buying milk and she was buying tampons. He let her go ahead of him in line; her eyes flickered, revealing clusters of lush lashes, her hand gripped his forearm for the barest second, her throaty voice rasped, _thank you_ — and Kylo was driven to his knees. Maybe it wasn’t love exactly, but Kylo was a romantic to his core. 

And so, on June 8th, the same day that a taxi cab skidded out of its lane just as Abby was jaywalking across Fifth Avenue, Kylo intervened in God’s will for the first and only time in his life — swooping from the skies in a flurry of thunder and sharp desperation, plucking Abby straight from the jaws of certain death. 

Less than twenty-four hours later, Kylo’s own wings were torn off in punishment for saving the girl who should have died. Ashamed and wingless, he Fell from the skies, the bloodied stumps from his shoulder blades steadily leaking through his T-shirt. Once on earth, he broke into someone else’s apartment, showered and scraped the blood from his shoulders, and went to find Abby.

Except that he found her in the arms of another man.

———-

This is what Kylo learned that day —

You can live your whole life in the same holding pattern, like getting the same sandwich every day at the same deli, or spending all of your time doing the same thing, wasting away in the same job — and one single person can change everything, in one single, insane moment. And that person might not even care. But you still have to deal with the aftermath anyway.

———-

Rey is biting on the end of a blue BIC and frowning at an email from Rachel regarding the Mike’s Hard Lemonade client, when Joanna comes sashaying by her desk.

She taps a manicured nail against the wood. Rey abruptly takes the blue BIC out of her mouth.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

Rey nods mutely, following Joanna into one of the conference rooms. There is a giant picture of a beach on the wall, rendered in such high pixels that Rey thinks she can almost see the palm trees sway in the breeze. Finn has been talking about taking their honeymoon somewhere beachy, like St. Tropez or Fiji. 

“So,” Joanna folds her body carefully into a chair, while Rey slumps opposite her. Today, Joanna is wearing a navy blazer and a thin black choker that looks both dangerous and sexy, with her white-blond hair arranged in complicated-looking braids. Rey is wearing jeans with the knees torn out, and only the vaguest approximation of eyeliner. “I have some great news to share. We’re promoting you!”

Rey jolts upright like she’s been electrocuted. Of all the things she was expecting, it wasn’t this. “When?” she asks dazedly.

“Effective immediately,” Joanna is smiling but it looks like a grimace. “You’ve single-handedly brought in one of our most lucrative accounts. We’re all so proud of you.”

Rey’s head is buzzing. “This is because of _Heaven and Hell_?”

Joanna’s smile is so carefully applied, it looks like it has been pasted on. “Yes. We’re giving you a twenty two percent raise.” She pushes a folded piece of paper across the desk. Rey stares blankly at the number on the page. 

“Thank you!” She’s trying hard to show the proper amount of enthusiasm, but her mouth feels heavy and her chest is tight. She wants for this to be merit based, knows it is not, and desperately resents feeling indebted to Kylo in any way. 

“I’m not finished,” Joanna’s chair scrapes against the ground. Rey knows what’s coming. She wishes for her BIC pen to chew on, then nervously gnaws at her fingers instead. “We’re putting you 100% on the _Heaven and Hell_ account,” Joanna says, “reducing your hours on other accounts. The client is putting forth even more money for this, and he wants you as his day-to-day. We have to give him what he wants. I don’t know the extent of your past relationship with him —” Joanna gives a short, disparaging laugh, the kind that says, _him and her, really, you’ve got to be kidding me_ — “but he wants _you_.”

Rey swallows her spit. “I’d rather not be full-time on that account,” she says, her voice so reed thin it’s almost a whisper.

Joanna rakes her up and down with steel blue eyes. “Has he ever threatened you? Scared you?”

“No. Nothing like that. I’m not afraid of him.”

“Made you feel uncomfortable in any way?”

When Rey hesitates, Joanna misreads her expression. Her eyes are gleeful. “Well, I imagine he has that effect on most women. And normally, I’d talk about how sleeping with a client is unethical, but in his case, how could you _possibly_ say no to that body, am I right?” Her lips part. “But sweetie, I really don’t think you’re his type.”

Rey does not think about the way Kylo’s eyes feel on her skin. She does not think about the way he listens to her, really _listens_ , staring at her with his chin in his hands, drinking her in, like he can inhale her dreams. “I have a fiancé,” she reminds Joanna.

Joanna shrugs. “Nothing’s final until after the wedding. One last thing — I want us to host an inaugural party at the bar next week.” She snaps her fingers. “I’m thinking glitz and glam, I’m thinking beautiful people. Maybe a masquerade theme, you know, cement _Heaven and Hell’s_ status as a sexy, dark, mysterious hangout. I can invite some of my contacts from the modeling world. You can invite some of your —” her gaze lands on Rey’s tattered jeans, “actually, never mind.”

Joanna has always possessed the ability to slice through other people’s self-assurances, but Rey is unmoved. “No problem,” she tells her boss coolly. “I can start planning now.”

———-

Rey is sketching furiously at the kitchen table when Finn comes home. “Hey babe.” He gives her a quick kiss on the cheek, while she makes a noncommittal sound. “How was work?”

“Fine.” She’s disinterested, looking up only for the barest of seconds. “Did you have a good day?”

“Nah,” he cracks his knuckles, sliding down into the chair opposite her. “Been fending off emails for hours. And Jimmy’s pissed because we don’t have enough media coming to MSG tomorrow to cover the summer tournament, which means I’m going to have to get up at 6AM and call all the broadcast desks, and I’m just so fucking tired —”

She’s not listening. Even though she’s making eye contact, uttering sympathetic sounds at the appropriate moments, he can tell that she’s not really here. It’s one of the things that he finds both fascinating and irritating about her. Rey doesn’t always live in reality. There’s a whole secret world in her head — a place full of shadow and strange places, where emotion trumps logic and where passion rules all — and he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t want to either. He prefers the comfortable hierarchy of 9-to-5s, the merit-based system of corporate life. 

Finn does love Rey, that’s not even a question. But maybe the smallest part of him asked her to marry him because he liked the way she looked and he didn’t want anybody else to have her. Finn sometimes wonders if the tiniest part of Rey ever thinks about that too.

He remembers how, on the day of the proposal, she’d left him kneeling on the ground for an uncomfortably long period of time. Right after he’d asked, _will you marry me_ , her pupils had dilated, swallowing up the iris of her eye. There was something utterly wild and ancient in her face, something that had scared him — and then in a second, it was gone. 

_Yes_ , she’d said, like she hadn’t had to even think about it.

But Finn still remembers the look on her face.

———-

Finn is whistling while he walks around the kitchen, reheating some chicken soup and making half hearted attempts at cleaning up the sink.

Rey is simultaneously waiting for him to ask about her drawing, while also knowing that he won’t — and hating herself for hoping. Finn isn’t the kind of guy to ask about a drawing. He’s the kind of guy to ask you how much money you’re making in your job, or what time your flight gets in from JFK, or what your plans are a week from next Tuesday. Finn lives in a world governed by law and order and the scientific hypothesis. There is no room for ambiguity under his roof; there is only _yes_ or _no_.

Rey looks down at the paper she’d drawn underneath her left hand, separated out into frames. In the first frame, a clump of girls sit around a table together while a boy with dark, spiky hair watches forlornly from the back of the room. In the next frame, one of the girls goes to sleep and then wakes up in the boy’s bedroom, her body as insubstantial as air, as light as a dream. She watches as he calls out her name in his sleep. Then, two frames over, the same thing happens — only this time, the boy is awake to see her. 

_Why are you here_ , the boy asks, his gaze sharp. _Is this some kind of trick?_

The girl says, _I don’t know. I only know that being here, in this dream with you, feels more real than anything that happens while I’m awake._

Rey is dissatisfied with the way she has drawn the boy. Actually that’s the problem — that she has drawn him to look so young, when in her head, he is a man. She is reaching for the charcoal when her phone buzzes ominously next to her.

_Can you come to the bar tomorrow after work?_

Tongue between her teeth, Rey struggles with her response. Lately, she’s been thinking that some distance will be good for both her and Kylo; it appears that Kylo doesn’t share this view.

_Is it something we can chat about over the phone? My afternoon is pretty free._

His reply is terse; she can almost picture the irritation on his face. _Absolutely not. It’s something we can chat about in person._

She sighs so gustily that Finn cocks his head at her from where he’s washing the pasta strainer. “Everything OK?”

“Yeah,” she makes a face, gesturing with her phone. “Client is being annoying.”

She types back. _You call the shots. See you tomorrow around 7_

———-

Kylo spots Rey in the exact moment that she walks into his bar. In a dark room, wearing a black dress, she is still the brightest thing he’s ever seen.

“Hi,” he says, pushing his way over towards her. The smile is hurting his cheeks. He should really try to be more aloof around her. Hux had spent maybe a good hour yesterday lecturing Kylo about the dangers of mortal women. _They trick you into paying for fancy dinners and god-awful dresses, and then they cut open your chest, peel back your veins, pull out your heart and play kickball with it. Remember how you Fell, Kylo? Remember Abby?_

 _I remember_ , Kylo had replied, irritated, and then he’d unearthed his phone and texted Rey to come to his bar. He didn’t know why he felt this need to see her, but maybe, it had something to do with the way they’d met. Before he’d Fallen, he’d been scooping up humans for centuries; but in his whole life, Rey was the only person who’d ever tried to save _him_. 

It also doesn’t hurt that she looks like a fucking goddess. Kylo keeps looking for some sort of fatal flaw: a birth defect, a wonky mole, an asymmetrical feature, even though he knows — none of these things would change the way he feels about her. 

“Hi,” her voice is a little breathless, her eyes almost luminous in the semi-darkness, like a cat’s eyes. “This place looks so different at night.”

“You like it?”

Her eyes linger on the huge sprawl of black feathered wings on the ceiling. “Uh-huh. I never asked. Why the focus on fallen angels?”

His heart skips a beat. “Oh, you know,” he keeps his voice light, conversational, “chicks dig that shit.”

Rey’s laugh is the most melodious sound he’s ever heard. “Oh my god,” she covers her mouth with her hand, still giggling, “ _chicks dig that shit?_ Really, Kylo? What, did you like, conduct a survey or something?”

Kylo isn’t even offended, because 1. She’s right and 2. He’s beginning to identify the way he feels around her. It’s as if he’s been unhappy for a very, very long time — only he never realized it before because he had nothing else to compare it to. And now he does.

“It is stupid,” he agrees easily. “But aren’t girls into that sort of thing? The _bad boy_ sort of thing? You know, like the vampires and werewolves and the need to pin down the class womanizer into a monogamous relationship?”

Rey gives a half-hearted shrug. “Well, I’m not so much into troupes,” she explains, “More like I just base everything on personality, and how someone makes me feel. I could care less about money or status or fame. At the end of the day, I want someone who sees past all the bullshit and all the triviality, someone who _knows_ me at my core, and loves me for me.”

His blood is fire. “And is that how your fiancé makes you feel?”

Her eyes are ice. “Yes, of course. He takes care of me.”

“Takes care of you, how? You make him sound like a babysitter.”

Her stare is like bulletproof glass, impenetrable, indestructible. “Did you have some reason for asking me to come down here? Or did you just want to insult my fiancé when he’s not even here to defend himself?”

Kylo blows out a deep breath and forces himself to calm down. “Yes, I did. I wanted to ask you … if you’re happy with this arrangement.”

“What?” Rey’s brow furrows.

“OK, so it’s like this,” Kylo is fumbling for words now, desperate to make himself understood, and unsure of how to do so. “I like you. You already know that. But I may have lost my head initially, and forced you into this client relationship, by jeopardizing your job. And that was wrong and I realize it now. So even though I do like you and I want to continue spending time with you — if you’re uncomfortable, we can stop this. We can have someone else put on the account, and take you off. You don’t have to spend time with me if you don’t want to.”

Rey’s gaze is very steady. The way she looks at him is physical, a pressure on his skin. “I was promoted today,” she tells him, “Mostly because of you. Because of this … _arrangement_.”

Kylo sucks in a breath. “Congratulations?”

Behind Rey, a women in a diamond bralette and leather pants winks at him from the bar. Her mind is full of lust, as are the minds of countless others here. Kylo can sense desire, sadness, fear and need from a myriad strangers — but nothing from the woman standing right in front of him, the only one he so desperately wants to know.

She says, “Kylo, I can’t give you anything romantic. I can’t do that to Finn. But I can tell you that I enjoy spending time with you, and that you make me feel …” she sucks in a deep breath, “you make me feel the most _me_ I’ve felt in a long time.”

Kylo swallows. “I’m not asking for anything romantic,” he says, and it’s the biggest lie he can remember telling since he Fell.

———-

Twilight in the Financial District is full of bruised shadows, long-fingered reflections of huge skyscrapers where bankers and analysts spend twenty hours a day hunched over their computers, dreaming of the millions they’ll make in five, ten, fifteen years. On Wall Street, time is a warped construct.

Just outside of One World Trade, two men sit together on a bench. There’s nothing visibly threatening about either of them, but passerby still hurry along. Hands clutch babies a little more tightly, heels click a little faster, wallets get pressed further down into purses.

“Humans,” the first man is muttering under his breath, “they never change.” The sun is aglow around his head, limning his pitch black hair with gold, but he casts no shadow.

The second man kicks his foot against the pavement. “We’ve found her,” he says. “It’s been so long, we thought it would never happen, but it’s her. I’d bet my life on it.”

The first man turns with a snarl, revealing molars tipped in metal. “If it’s not her, you’ll wish you were dead.”

The second man is unperturbed by the threat. The sun is in his eyes, but he doesn’t squint. His expression is serene. “It’s her. But I thought you might need some convincing after the last … mishap … so I’ve prepared a little test.”

“When?”

The second man looks up towards heaven, the sun bathing him in a golden glow. “Soon.”


	6. Chapter 6

Ensconced under the bright lights of Bloomingdale’s, wearing her tired sandals and her hair in a messy topknot, the black dress had seemed perfectly appropriate. But now… 

Rey fiddles with the hem, tugging it down from where it bunches up insistently around her thighs. The heels wrap around the backs of her ankles and tie at the low end of her calf; the heels aren’t the problem. Rey purses her lips at her reflection. _It’s the general aesthetic_ , she decides. It’s the heels _plus_ the cut of the dress _plus_ the mask _plus_ the wings. 

God. _The wings_. Only Kylo would decide that a masquerade event wasn’t glitzy enough. No — he also had to add a theme. And in this case, the theme happened to be _heaven and hell_ , as was in keeping with the establishment’s name. 

Rey had purchased the matching gold mask and set of angel wings from Party City two days ago. Enormous and ostentatious, the wings dwarf her in stature, cascading miniature waves of glitter in her wake. She’d chosen something silly because she hadn’t wanted to wear anything that could be construed as sexy. And by themselves, the wings were silly. But once they were paired with the slinky black dress, and the slinky black shoes and the gold mask and the gold eyeliner … _fuck all, it’s the aesthetic_ , Rey tells herself again, firmly.

A long, low whistle interrupts her musings. Finn makes a crude hand gesture from where he’s standing propped against the doorjamb, his eyes trailing her body up and down in a blatant show of raw appreciation. It’s enough to make any good girl blush. But not her. “Well now I definitely think I might stop by this party — if only so that you can bless me with your angelic presence.”

“I thought you had to work?” She’s not sure why the thought of Kylo and Finn in the same place should have her pulse pumping this hard. In the low lighting, her veins look purple, enlarged with capillaries, close to the surface of her skin.

Finn smirks. “Think I can make time for you, gorgeous.” He crosses the room in two strides and presses his mouth against hers. His fingers are big and warm, smearing along the lines of her cheekbones. She can smell the whiskey on his breath. 

“Finn, no —” she makes a show of laughing, to ease the tension of her fingertips on his jaw, pushing him away. “You’ll ruin my makeup. We can finish this later. When I get home.”

“OK.” Finn rubs his jaw. His eyes still follow her, even without her permission.

———-

After Rey leaves, Finn pours himself a double bullet bourbon on the rocks and watches the ice melt into the amber liquid. Emails spool relentlessly across the screen of his laptop: mandates from his boss to finish the briefing book for the summer tournament, vendor invoices, media queries from GQ editors. Jackson Carone wants to interview John Legend for the Axe event next month.

“Not fucking happening, man,” Finn says out loud, taking a swig of the whiskey. When he gets up for more ice, he catches sight of his reflection in the mirror above the microwave. Three livid finger-shaped bruises press into his jaw, in the exact outline of a handprint. As he stares into the mirror, he appears to flinch — or rather, his _skin_ flinches — rippling over the bruises and settling back into its normal shape. 

Finn shakes his head, clearing his vision. _Too much whiskey_ , he tells himself.

———-

Rey arrives early at _Heaven and Hell_ , where she promptly dusts the place in gold glitter, installs the automatic-flame fireplace in the “hell” section of the bar, and checks in at the confessional at the back of the room. The confessional booth is comprised of latticework wood panelling, outfitted with a red satin curtain and two tiny, pockmarked stools. They’ve hired an actress to stand in as the “priestess,” and now she hovers in front of Rey with her hands folded, her black hair tumbling across her shoulders, and tiny silver crucifixes glittering along the edge of her low-cut black dress.

“Just want to make sure you understand what’s going on tonight,” Rey consults her clipboard. “So you’re going to stand in front of this area here,” she waves at the confessional, “encouraging party-goers to step behind the curtains and confess their sins to you. Here are your talking points,” she hands the actress a sheet from her clipboard, “pretty simple, some basic branding stuff. Once the person has talked through their sins, you’ll give them a token from this bag here,” she kicks the burlap sack at her feet, “and direct them over to the bar, where they can exchange their token for a special drink called the penance. Any questions?”

“Uh-huh,” the actress, whose name is Eileen, shakes her head emphatically, “what sort of sins are people supposed to be telling me?”

Rey stares at the creamy white skin of her throat. Eileen’s eyes are dark and unfocused. A silver ring pokes out from her bottom lip.

“Anything,” Rey says hoarsely. “It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. Just them sitting in the confessional and talking to you is enough to earn them a token. A sin can be … forgetting to pay rent or fighting with your mom or … feeling something for someone you’re not supposed to.”

 _Crash_. 

Rey looks up from her clipboard. Kylo is standing just behind the confessional, his black eyes luminous against a backdrop of scarlet cloth and old fashioned looking wood. He’s wearing a red cape, leather pants and horns so sleek and polished, they look professionally glued to his head. Shards of broken glass dust his feet. He’d dropped his drink. 

The oxygen in the air shrivels as Rey fixates on Kylo’s perfect, sculptural mouth. Kylo’s answering gaze scorches her skin. It brings Rey’s heart up to her throat and sends color skittering across the column of her throat. She swallows back her spit and waits for Kylo to say something, something like _you look silly in those wings_ — except instead, his eyes are telling her everything she’s terrified to address. Mutely, they stare at each other across a room full of halos and hellfire. And then Kylo turns and stalks away, his cape making little swishing noises in his wake.

Eileen laughs throatily. 

Rey shakes her head, both furious and secretly pleased. “It’s not like that. I have a fiancé,” she snaps back haughtily.

Eileen is unrepentant. “Whatever. None of my business,” she says, her hands clasped together in a mimicry of piety.

———-

Kylo doesn’t know when Rey went from being just _interesting_ to _mesmerizing_. Seeing her earlier tonight — those gold angel wings had triggered something deep and buried inside him. She’d been wearing a black dress so insubstantial he could see every curve and flare of her body through the fabric. In his head, he’d ripped the clothing off her, kissed his way up her body (starting with her ankles) and watched her mouth contort as she writhed and moaned his name.

Hux sidles up beside him, glass in hand. “Stop being so obvious.”

“I wasn’t looking at Rey,” Kylo grinds out, angry and defensive. “Go away.”

Hux’s laugh is sharp and hard, the edges of it a little too broken. “Who said I was even talking about Rey?”

Kylo cracks his knuckles and doesn’t respond. Across the room, Rey flits between guests, all of them a mix of something beautiful and otherworldly. Underneath the angel masks and devil horns, party-goers sport perfect tans and bleached smiles. They’re only playing pretend at a cosmic life when Kylo was never given a choice. 

Hux gulps down the remainder of his drink, ice crunching between his teeth. “You all set to give the speech?”

“Sure.” Kylo feels raw, swollen up with too much emotion, a balloon waiting to be burst, needing only a pin prick to release the tension. He’s furiously sad. _Is this to be his eternal punishment, desperately wanting what he can never have?_ He swallows back the familiar urge to look skyward, a phantom gesture from days past, back when he believed that God still had his best interests at heart. 

Hux sidles away. “Come find me when you’re in a better mood, why dontcha?”

Kylo doesn’t even bother to respond.

———-

“Make sure you get some photos of guests at the confessional,” Rey advises the photographer, quickly skimming through his reel of images, and finding it lacking. “And maybe some pictures of the bartenders pouring the drinks. And we’ll do some staged shots of celebrities in front of the step and repeat, and of Kylo and Hux closer to the end of the night. Sound good?”

The photographer nods. “Sure,” he tells her. He has electric blue eyes, ringed with a plethora of dark lashes that give him a dreamy look. This is negated by his square chin, and by the way the rest of his face is broad too, with thick eyebrows and fleshy cheekbones — everything big and hard, those sky blue eyes his only delicate feature. The intensity of his gaze borders on inappropriate.

“Remind me your name,” Rey says, and he tells her it’s Eric, fiddling with his camera strap, while she gives him more instruction about the kind of mood lighting she’s looking for. 

Then she facilitates an interview between Kylo and _Esquire_ ’s F&B editor, who asks questions about the history of the bar and would like to know more about the inspiration behind the angel décor. _That makes two of us_ , Rey thinks, but Kylo offers only minimal explanation. By the end of the interview, his monosyllabic answers, accessorized with sarcastic eyebrow lifts and snarling consonants, prompt Rey to grab his hand and pull him into a back room, where she demands to know what’s wrong.

“My job is to get you and your bar good press,” she hurls at him, waving a hand back at the roomful of people, “Everyone is here for you. This party is for you. I can’t do my job if you’re just going to terrorize reporters and scare away potential customers.”

Kylo looks down at her, his brow furrowed. Even when she's in heels, he still has a good couple of inches on her. The tips of his horns are polished to perfect, pristine points. Rey wants to touch one with her fingertips, to test whether it is as sharp as it looks. 

“I’ll try to do better.”

It’s a childish statement, ground out between his teeth, but the darkness behind his eyes is so palpable that she forgets herself. “Kylo. What’s wrong?”

The misery in his face sharpens. “Nothing.”

His _nothing_ is the same as her _nothing_ on the nights when the ache eats her inside out, when she draws by the light of a flashlight, while Finn snores placidly underneath the covers and her pencil digs furiously into the page and makes a pulping of the paper. She recognizes Kylo’s expression because it is so often the same expression she buries beneath her bright smile. It is a _wanting_ made poignant precisely because the object of the wanting is difficult to articulate. When Rey lies awake in bed and sketches until the skin between her thumb and forefinger tears angrily — what does she want exactly? Someone who understands her without words, someone who won’t flinch at the darker, ragged edges of her soul. An end to the hollow sensation that gnaws at her gut and whispers that something is wrong with her, that she is incomplete, that she doesn’t know who she really is. 

Now, Rey stands on her tiptoes in an effort to match Kylo’s height, and she cups his face in her hands, holding it lightly, like blown glass. Then she closes her eyes and bends forward, touching her nose to his. 

The silence is very loud. The moment is so full of _them_ as one entity, and so devoid of _him_ and _her_ as separate beings. Rey’s hands migrate from Kylo’s cheeks to graze his throat and she can feel his pulse jumping frantically underneath her fingers.

———-

Kylo gives a beautifully eloquent speech, flawlessly hitting on all his key messages. He is funny without being sarcastic, informative without being boring and gracious without being condescending. He welcomes guests, celebrities and media, encouraging them to partake in the open bar, the photo booth and the interactive “confessional” and touches on _Heaven and Hell’s_ upcoming events. The only time he strays from the script is when he calls Rey out specifically, praising her professionalism and their “close, working relationship.”

Rey can only nod her head at the attention, and hope her blush doesn’t show too much in the darkness. It is all a lie. She cannot remember a time when she ever felt less professional. 

“Cheers,” Kylo says, raising a fluted glass, and everyone in the bar follows suit. When he takes a sip, a drop of red liquid beads his lower lip, and Rey is suddenly overcome with the desire to lick it off, to take his bottom lip between her teeth and _bite_ , and kiss him languidly, softly. Fire zigzags a burning path up her spine. She’s so disconcerted that she wanders over to the confessional booth, where Eileen is sitting and waiting, her hands folded in her lap underneath a swaying, silver crucifix — a pious facade belied by the violent slash of glittery eyeshadow and low cut dress. 

Rey gets into the booth. Eileen draws the curtain. Rey traces the wooden lattice work, her fingers lingering over a dent. 

“What would you like to confess?” Eileen’s voice is low and heavy. 

Rey leans back and closes her eyes. What should she say? _That she’s awfully, terribly, irrevocably attracted to one man when she’s engaged to another?_ She could say that. She could also select from a myriad sins, of smaller, inconsequential transgressions: yesterday, she lied and said she had a doctor’s appointment when she didn’t so she could leave work early, last week, she stole a $2 chapstick from CVS. Instead, she mentally sorts back through the mess of white lies and mistakes, choosing to articulate the thing she’s buried down deep.

“My father tried to get in touch with me two years ago,” she says aloud, the word _father_ feeling strange on her tongue, “but I refused to see him.”

There’s a rustle of silk to her left as Eileen changes position. “Don’t forget to take a token from the bag on your way out.”

Once at the bar, Rey nudges the token across the counter to the bartender, who watches her with hazel eyes. His earlobes are stretched out from wearing those giant circular earrings, the original ear piercing transformed from a slit to a yawning hole — but he has a nice looking face, with the kind of stubble that promises gritty kisses. 

“I confessed,” Rey smiles, tapping her tongue against the back of her teeth, “and now I’m ready for my penance.”

When she throws back the bourbon in one smooth shot, she can feel the bartender’s gaze on her throat, watching her swallow.

———-

The woman Kylo is talking to tells him that she’s Anna Kendrick’s cousin, but she looks nothing like the girl who transformed Barden University’s acapella scene and went on to pursue her dreams of becoming a DJ (pop culture — he’s learning about it).

Her name is Lindsey. She has a nose piercing and blonde hair with dark roots. The thick layer of makeup doesn’t disguise the hard skin and broken capillaries underneath, though Kylo’s not one to frown on a drinker. She has a tight little body, poured into a tiny black Tshirt and heels tall enough to match his height. 

“That was some speech,” she smiles at him, nose ring glinting dully in the light. “What’d you … like, take public speaking classes in school?”

“Something like that,” Kylo says politely, wondering if speaking to hordes of angels counts as a _class_. 

Lindsey puts her small, manicured hand on his arm. “We should grab a drink sometime, you and I.”

“We _are_ drinking,” Kylo points to the respective glasses in both his and Lindsey’s hands, but the fugue of lust wafting from her mind is almost too much to overcome. Sometimes, the burden of tapping into other people’s emotions exhausts him, but other times, he enjoys feeling the way human women want him. If he can’t have Rey …

The memory of her breath on his cheeks breaks through his subconscious, unbidden. He hates himself for how she can reduce him down to his most primal desires with minimal effort. Fuck, he hates everything about the way she makes him feel — except that he doesn’t. Not at all.

———-

Rey pushes open the back door of the bar, walking into the storage space where she’d deposited her purse earlier. Rifling through the contents, she inhales the crumby remains of a granola bar and reapplies a thick layer of lip gloss.

She looks upwards. Even here, in this back space that no one really sees, angel wings dominate the ceiling: black, thick and frosted. Enormous and exaggerated, the feathered edges of the wings drape down the walls, making her feel like she’s in the presence of some kind of massive, supernatural being.

“Hello.” The voice behind her is unnaturally loud in the stillness. She turns, spinning on her heel.

“Oh. Eric, it’s you.”

The photographer is standing behind her, the lens of his camera cocked weirdly out of the gear bag slung from his shoulder. His blue eyes are fixed on her with the same, unnerving intensity as before. Again, they look strangely delicate in such a hard face.

“What are you doing here? Did you take the posed shots of Kylo and Hux?”

He doesn’t respond. His tongue flicks across his lips: a pink, malicious swipe. Rey can almost see him thinking behind his eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, finally. “You seem nice. But I never really had a choice.”

———-

Lindsey’s teeth are just grazing the edge of Kylo’s neck, hard enough to leave bruises — except that he never bruises, never even bleeds — when he senses the edges of a twisted, violent mind. His head snaps up.

“What is it?” Lindsey coos. Her mouth is sticky, coated red with wine and lipstick. 

“I have to go,” Kylo chokes out, already pushing his way past the crowd.

———-

The first gunshot hits too high, ricocheting off the wall, but the second one pierces Rey’s side. She registers it first as a spreading warmth, a red flower blooming around her pelvic bone, as she slips slowly to her knees, a black angel’s wings encircling her. A shimmer of sweat coats her skin, her tongue fuzzy in her mouth.

She mouths the word _why_ , but no sound comes out. _What is this? What is happening?_

Eric the photographer is coming closer, his expression inscrutable. The lens of his Sony camera is flecked with blood, the handgun shiny in his hands where it catches the low light. He aims it carefully at her chest —

—And then there’s a blur of motion, a man moving so fast that Rey can’t tell who it is, except she thinks she _does_ know, that she’ll _always_ know Kylo, the way that you just _know_ certain things, like which neighborhood street will lead you home, and which people you can trust.

There’s an awful, high pitched squeal. Rey has somehow fallen down. She knows this because the ground is hard. She tries to stand, and falls back on her elbows, pricked with a dull stab of annoyance that she is so helpless. Blood seeps into a small, shallow pool underneath her waist. She grits her teeth, Kylo’s face swimming into her vision above her.

“Rey.” His eyes are wild, his hands shaking as he smooths back her hair. “Rey. Rey.”

She tries for a smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, you and I.”

He muffles a laugh that sounds like a sob. “I called 911.”

“Did you?” Black buzzes behind her eyes, an ache sweeping through her body. “Kylo. I don’t want to die.”

“Sweetheart.” His hands are frantic, everywhere. Touching her body. Stemming the blood. “I won’t let you.”

She closes her eyes and surrenders to the black.


	7. Chapter 7

_Rey is dreaming of a girl crouched underneath a plastic lawn table. It is nighttime, the moon a thin, broken circle of white hanging jaggedly from the sky. The grass around her is strewn with red solo cups, cigarette butts and cracked leaves, remnants of a college-style party._

_The girl rocks back and forth, back and forth. Her pupils are huge and distorted, swallowing up the irises of her eyes. The grass flattens, footsteps crunching closer across the dirt-packed lawn. The girl keeps rocking, her head down, her knees drawn up to her chest. She knows something is about to happen. The moment feels thinner somehow, like it will crack in two. There is a chilly, squirming sensation dancing across her skin. She presses a finger to her forearm. Goosebumps._

_“Hello.” A boy is looking down at her, his gold-slitted eyes jutting proudly above the blue-purple shadows of his cheekbones, so chiseled and taut she thinks she’d cut her fingers grazing his face. “What are you doing?”_

_The girl looks up, her pulse beating shallowly against the fragile skin of her throat in the face of all that unnatural looking beauty. “Oh, it’s you. Nothing. I’m doing nothing. Are you really here? Shelley said that you didn’t like me, that you were only pretending.”_

_“You shouldn’t listen to Shelley.” The boy hunkers down, his knees bent and fingers outstretched, like he’s coaxing a wounded animal to him. “I was looking for you. Are you OK?”_

_The girl’s breathing is tight, betraying a mixture of excitement and panic. Strands of damp, dark hair — so like Rey’s — coil messily away from her face. She’s wearing tiny, silver hoop earrings. One of them is cracked. “Touch me,” she whispers._

_The boy reaches down gently, into the shadows underneath the plastic table, and after a second, the girl reaches back, her body jolting as their fingers graze…_

Rey wakes up with a suddenness that feels like falling headlong and landing hard. Someone’s fingertips are resting against her bare arm; she realizes that her body’s awareness of the physical contact is what had awakened her. She’s lying down, in a bed full of starched sheets, machines humming tunelessly next to her. Her stomach is tight and aching. When she tries to sit up, a sharp pain splices through the core of her body like a jagged streak of lightning. The dream still feels alarmingly vivid: the girl with her bent back and bare knees, somehow attracted to, and yet still terrified of, the strange boy who seemed just a little inhumanly beautiful to be real.

“Finn.” 

Her fiancé’s face is full of a raw, wild terror, but that’s nothing compared to what she sees on the face of the other man in the room. Leaning up against the wall, watching her, Kylo’s expression is … _haunted_. He’s still wearing his earlier party clothes, minus the cape, but there are rust colored streaks lining his shoulders, smearing messily across the white button down. He’s taken off his horns, but even so, Rey thinks there will always be something otherworldly about him. Like the boy she’d just seen in her dream — his beauty is almost too piercing, too polished to be real. Everyone Rey has ever known has had a little bit of messiness to them: frizzy hair, weight gain, yellowed teeth, moles in the wrong places. But not Kylo. Kylo is perfect. 

Her stomach drops, mentally cataloguing how she must look right now compared to him. Turning to Finn, she reaches up and clasps her fiancé’s fingers, the movement sending a zigzag of pain down her left side.

“It’s OK.” Finn’s eyes are damp around the edges. A tiny white scar mars his left temple, a reassuring reminder of his imperfections. “Don’t move, babe. Just try to relax.”

“What happened?”

“You were shot.” Kylo’s eyes are dark and shadowed, his unblinking stare full of bite and snarl. “Shot at a fucking party by a fucking photographer you hired. Any idea why that may have happened?”

Rey’s temper sparks. “Why are you making it sound like an accusation? Why is it my fault I was shot?”

“I didn’t mean —” Kylo looks away, a muscle jumping in his jawbone. “I only meant … I was so _worried_ …”

He runs a shaking hand through his black hair and Finn says, “Look man, maybe it’s better if you just leave.” Turning to Rey, he raises an eyebrow, mouthing _why is he here?_

Rey has lots of ideas about how Kylo ended up in the hospital room with her, most of them involving his ability to charm any woman walking. But now Kylo is looking at her again and his expression is raw, his eyes tortured. There is a squeezing sensation in her chest that has nothing to do with her wound. “I’ll go if you want me to go Rey,” he promises, his words searing into her skin, "And I’ll stay if you want me to stay. Whatever you want.”

Next to her, Finn blows out a huge breath of air, his body posture ramrod straight. Rey thinks about the way Kylo’s always been able to sense what she needs and how she feels. She remembers what she’d told him at the bar, once, _you make me feel the most me I’ve felt in a long time_. She remembers the way his face had swum above hers as she’d faded to unconsciousness, and the fierce wildness carved into his features as he’d promised, _I won’t let you die_. 

“Stay, please,” she licks cracked lips. “Just for a little bit.”

Kylo’s whole face changes, emotion stretching his features, widening his eyes and softening the hard curve of his jaw. “I’ll be here as long as you want me to.”

Finn’s expression has matured from disbelieving to incredulous. He clears his throat. “Um, no offense Rey, but this is your client. Don’t you think this is a little inappropriate?”

“I think,” Kylo says, leaning very casually up against the wall, “that you should shut the hell up.”

Finn balls his fists. “Listen, I don’t know what your deal is —”

Rey wants to tell the two of them to knock it off, but she’s sinking back into the pillow against her will, her mind a haze of black fog.

Finn’s attention refocuses. He lifts one of her hands up from the bed and presses kisses against the individual knuckles. “Sleep,” Finn murmurs. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I love you. You are so special to me.”

 _Special_ , Rey thinks, the word unlocking a memory in her head. _Special_. The last thing she sees is Kylo’s black eyes blazing into hers from across the room.

———-

Rey’s mother, LeeAnn, died when Rey was seven years old.

This is how Rey remembers her — as a collection of sensations: rough, warm fingers holding her, her raspy voice humming _Knockin’ on Heavens Door_ , the way she smelled like a mixture of cinnamon and sweat. And later — how the rain felt on Rey’s bare shoulders while she stood in a field and watched strangers lower her mom’s body into a casket in the ground. 

She was too young to give a real obituary, so instead, she folded her hands and tried to pray while a preacher summarized her mother with a verse from 1st Corinthians. The congregation choked back tears to the tune of a Bob Dylan song and the preacher raised bleary eyes heavenward. _LeeAnn McGregor_ , he’d intoned, _was a light unto all our paths. May she rest in peace_.

It was true. LeeAnn McGregor, with her dark hair and startling blue eyes, with her perfect, alabaster skin and her smile that lit up the world, had been the belle of Greenville, Kentucky. She’d been destined for moviestar-dom, for bright lights and big cities, but then she got knocked up at sixteen and dropped out of school. When Rey asked about her dad, LeeAnn only ever got a strange, pinched expression on her face and started picking at her fingernails. She was a master of evasion when it came to Rey’s conception — but she was exceptionally forthcoming around the details of Rey’s birth.

For instance, Rey knew that LeeAnn had been wracked with severe stomach pain and nausea throughout the majority of the pregnancy. She knew that at the six month mark, her mother had laid in a pool of her own blood, sweating through the mattress in the middle of a July day that bordered on a hundred and ten degrees, when the room flared with a sudden flash of blinding, white light. 

An angel stood in front of her, his wings folded backwards, blinking at her with eyes such a pale shade of blue, they looked practically colorless, washed nearly white. LeeAnn told Rey that if she’d been standing, she would have fallen to her knees, but as it was — she was already lying down.

 _So I prayed_ , she told her daughter, _I said my Hail Marys, and I told God that I was ready to go, but I asked, could He please spare my child, if that was His will? And baby, would you believe it, but the angel gave me medicine that he said would take away all my pain? I drank it and the stomach cramps stopped immediately._

Rey pictured the scene: a sweaty, pregnant women writhing on a cheap twin bed under the judgmental gaze of an avenging angel. Except, even as a small child, she knew there’d been no angel. 

A diagnosed schizophrenic, LeeAnn McGregor had been doing fine for the past few years, but only because she’d stuck to her medical regimen. Back then, with her pregnancy hormones churning, it was easy to imagine how things could have gotten out of control.

Still, stubbornly, in the face of wide public disbelief, LeeAnn clung to her story. _My angel baby_ , she’d always called Rey, _my special one_.

———-

Once outside the hospital room, Kylo’s knees finally give way. He slumps to the tiled floor, a burning pressure behind his eyes, his fingers shaking. _Rey should have died_. He realizes this in a logically detached sort of way, aware that back in the bar, she’d been unconscious and bleeding out, likely on the threshold of death, before the blood had inexplicably… just stopped, further proof that she wasn't fully mortal. Hux had found Kylo only moments after the gunshots, cradling Rey’s limp body, the remains of Eric the photographer littered on the floor behind him.

 _Remains_. Eric’s body had quite literally been _torn apart_ , leaving behind only parts of the man, like jagged puzzle pieces: a mangled hand, a punctured foot, entrails spilling out a grotesque, red pattern. 

Normally, Hux’s eyes were the palest color blue, almost white really, but in that moment, they were only black holes in his face. His voice was low, thunderous. He spoke in their mother tongue of Enochian. “Kylo. What happened here?”

Kylo gesticulated wildly. “He tried to kill Rey. She might already … I’m not sure ….”

Hux’s gaze flickered down to Rey, and then back to Eric’s detached left calf. “And you didn’t think to ask what his motive may have been for trying to kill Rey?”

Kylo laughed a soft, broken noise that was the furthest thing from merriment Hux had ever heard. “I have my priorities,” he’d told his friend, pointing to Rey, “Like her first, and everything else clocking in at _I don’t give a flying fuck_.”

Hux blinked. “OK,” he’d said. “Fair. Get her to the hospital. I’ll clean this up and take care of the guests.”

And so Kylo had ridden with Rey in the back of an ambulance that smelled like antiseptic and death, wedged in between emergency responders that were far less capable than he. Rey breathed steadily into an oxygen mask while Kylo clasped her cold fingers, gritted his teeth and called someone named Finn that Rey had listed in her phone contacts underneath a bunch of heart eyes emoticons. His throat constricted painfully.

“Hello?”

Kylo had swallowed back his bile. “I assume this is Rey’s fiancé?”

The voice on the other end of the phone turned wary. “May I ask who’s calling?”

Kylo choked. _The man who loves her_ , was his first wild, unbridled thought. “I’m her …client,” he managed, hating that word. It was so impersonal, so utterly unreflective of their relationship. He amended, “I’m her friend. There’s been an accident at the party tonight. We’re on the way to Cedars-Sinai Hospital right now. Please hurry.”

Finn uttered a short, foul word before the phone clicked off. Kylo hung his head in his hands, remembering the day he’d Fallen from Heaven, how he’d felt so powerless and impotent, how the blood from his wing stumps had dripped gently down his arms, how the world around him had spun and swirled, how there’d been so much sky he’d thought he might choke on all that wide, bright blue. 

He’d called Finn purely for Rey’s sake, because he’d wanted her to wake up surrounded by the people that she loved. He’d done it because love was supposed to be selfless, because even though his feelings of need and desire were anything but, he was trying to be a better man. 

The hospital door bangs open behind him. “What is your fucking problem?”

Kylo raises his head, meeting Finn’s murderous gaze evenly. “Excuse me? Last I checked, I was the one to save Rey’s life.”

Finn’s face is flushed with rage, his brown eyes darkening. Kylo had never experienced thunderstorms until he’d Fallen to earth, but Finn’s expression reminds him of the way that heat builds and air ripens in the summertimes, seeking to find a suitable release for itself. The rain, when it comes, is only a sweet release of tension, an end to pressure.

Finn jabs a finger into Kylo’s chest. “I don’t know what your relationship with her is, but I’m telling you, it ends now.”

The snarl builds in the back of Kylo’s throat. “I told you. I’m her _client_.” He wonders if the roiling waves of possession emanating from Finn’s mind are a true indication of his feelings towards Rey, or just a jealous response. Either way, she deserves better. It would be laughably easy to squash Finn’s face into the hospital wall, similarly to the manner in which he’d decimated Eric, but then Kylo thinks about how Rey would react when she woke up and learned that he’d murdered her fiancé. 

So he dusts himself off and gets to his feet. Hux would laugh if he could see him now. He’d remind him of Abby, remind him of how he Fell, remind him of all his shortcomings. 

Love is supposed to be Heaven’s greatest power, but it has always made Kylo weak.


	8. Chapter 8

“Did it hurt very much?”

Rey’s coworker and seat neighbor, Rachel Rosander, leans over the cubicle divider to survey Rey with wide blue eyes. Sunshine smears through the dusty office window, illuminating a light smattering of golden brown freckles across her cheekbones.

“Did what hurt?” Rey asks crossly. It is three weeks later, and her second day back at work. Her cubicle is full of _Get Well Soon_ balloons (ridiculous, because she’s already better) and a whole cornucopia of rose blooms that obstinately shed pink and white gilded petals across her phone. She had to call both Kylo and Finn and demand they stop sending flower bouquets because they were crowding up her desk; Finn had desisted, but Kylo had sneakily retaliated with another gift, a beautiful leather bound sketchbook full of cream edged paper. Rey had stared at it, hot tears blurring the edges of her vision. Then she’d placed it carefully in the back of her desk drawer next to spare paperclips and old Christmas cards and tried to forget about how Kylo’s gaze had scraped her skin raw like sandpaper, laying her bare and exposed.

“When you got shot,” Rachel clarifies. “What did it feel like? Did it hurt?”

Rey clamps down _hard_ on the sarcastic response wriggling behind her teeth. “Yes,” she says, “It hurt.” _It felt warm_ , is what she doesn’t say. After the first bright bolt of searing pain, there’d been warm swirls of wetness, eager blood rushing to fill up the holes in her body.

“Oh my god.” Rachel stares at her, horrified, through splayed fingers. “And you don’t know why the guy shot you?”

“He was crazy.” Rey’s voice is steady. She doesn’t waver with the lie, not even when she thinks about Eric staring at her with intense blue eyes, his tongue a malicious pink swipe against his lips, ruby droplets flecking the lens of his camera. _I’m sorry. You seem nice. But I never had a choice_. She clenches one fist reflexively underneath her desktop, her nails digging tiny crescent shaped marks into the skin.

Rachel shakes her head. “The whole thing is just so scary. I can’t believe you’re already back at work.”

Rey’s email reloads, spitting out a note about phishing and a reminder of an upcoming trade show downtown next month. “I was lucky,” she says briskly, recovering. “The bullets only scraped me.”

This is another lie. The first bullet had nicked her, but the second bullet had lodged high, hitting the artery underneath her clavicle. It should have led to massive hemorrhaging, killing her in minutes, but it hadn’t. Instead, she’d healed within hours, mystifying modern science. The doctors had been stunned, Finn was at a loss — only Kylo looked at her like he knew more than he wanted to share. Which was honestly how he looked at her most of the time. 

Rachel cocks her head, sunlight spilling over the gold swath of her hair like water. “And your client saved you, right? The hot, slightly creepy one?”

Rey only nods, bracing herself for judgment, remembering how Joanna’s gaze had scythed her through her. _Sweetie, I really don’t think you’re his type_. 

In some cases, personality and humor mean that people get better looking the longer you get to know them — but Kylo got to unfairly catapult past all this, thanks to his rugged cheekbones and tortured eyes and body that screamed at a timeline of weights and strength training. Nowhere is this kind of beauty valued more than in the superficial world of public relations, where people are constantly trying to one up each other in the who’s-who game. At work, the girls typically flaunt Alice + Olivia jeans, contoured cheekbones and hairstyles ripped straight out of the pages of _Cosmo_ — while Rey rotates between black tanks and 80s band Tshirts. 

She knows who she is. She knows that she’s never belonged in this world. But it only ever bothered her until after she met Kylo. 

“Oh, to be rescued by such a hot guy,” Rachel says finally. Her eyes are dreamy. “You’re so lucky.”

 _That's one way to put it_ , Rey thinks drily, turning back to her computer screen.

———-

In the staff meeting that afternoon, Joanna wears a cream blazer, teetering silver heels and tortoiseshell glasses — purely for aesthetic purposes, since she has 20/20 vision. “We’re up twenty percent for the year so far,” she intones, gleeful, stabbing a taloned fingernail at the chart projected on the wall. “And with three new accounts under our belt, our growth is only projected to continue at an exponential rate.” _Clickety clack_ go her Jimmy Choos. Her smile never falters.

 _If Joanna had been a teacher_ , Rey thinks to herself, _she’d have been the kind that stomped across the classroom and read aloud from textbooks, just to hear herself talk_. Class participation wasn’t in Joanna’s repertoire. She didn’t like her authority challenged, and that tended to happen when other people voiced their thoughts. Into the notepad on her lap, Rey scribbles a caricature of Joanna the teacher, her glasses perched on the edge of her nose, her lips exaggerated into a bulbous pout, her hair cascading down her back. _No talking_ , she instructs her watchful class, who sit awed into silence by her eye-popping curves. 

“Another one of our big wins this month was on the Walmart team,” Joanna continues, “who killed it with their recent activation featuring Lucy Liu!” She thrusts her hands into the air and mimes clapping, indicating that the rest of the room should follow suit. This is met with half-hearted applause. 

“Great job, all!” Joanna says enthusiastically and insincerely, her ice blond hair swaying in tandem with her steps. Today, it’s been carefully styled into french braid pigtails. This would make most women look like high schoolers, but Joanna is giving off hot Insta star vibes. She looks like the kind of girl who poses on the edge of a yacht draped in body jewelry and a barely there bikini, her hair a messy flame across one shoulder, her concave stomach on full display, her mouth making kissy faces at the camera, above obnoxious captions like, _LA winter is brutal_ , or _today I had tacos for breakfast_. 

Rey turns to another page in her notepad, but instead of sketching Joanna, Insta Goddess, she starts drawing a girl spread eagled on the ground, her body a riddled mass of bullets. Inspired by the shooting, she’s started on another graphic novel, this one darker than anything she’s ever drawn before. In the story, the main character, Keira, is targeted by a vengeful ex-lover, who stalks her across a backdrop of dusky cornfields and empty country roads. At the local bar, right in the middle of flirting with a bassist performing a live gig on Thursday nights, Keira is shot four times in the stomach and shoulders. All hell breaks loose while she lies on the floor, bleeding out, her eyes two giant black pupils, blown wide in disbelief and pain — until her best friend Billy kneels down next to her with an unknown concoction in his hand, and says _drink this_. Up to this point, Keira had believed Billy to be mortal, like her, but that isn’t the case. He’s part angel, and he’d drawn out his own blood to save her. When Keira wakes up, she is no longer quite human, but not quite angel either. Whatever she is now— some kind of weird, _in between_ species — she can see … _things_ she hadn’t been able to see before: angels, with huge, feathered black wings, glamoured to look like humans, and demons, with their fangs folded back behind forked tongues, both species stalking the Earth as their personal playground. Here is what Keira comes to learn — that while Sunday school taught her which side is _good_ and which side is _bad_ , in life, there are no blacks and whites, only different shades of grey.

“Rey!” Joanna’s nostrils are white, a sure sign that she’s pissed off. _Shit_. Rey slaps her notebook closed and looks up, then jerks in her chair, unable to hide her physical reaction.

Kylo Ren is standing next to Joanna, sporting his trademark black duds and smiling a crooked smile that says he sees her and he knows … what she was doing. What she was thinking. Or what she looks like naked. _When the fuck did he get here?_

Rey swallows. The entire room looks different with him standing there. He’s so beautiful that there's a dizzying sense of dissonance about him, almost like he's merely being projected into his surroundings, like he's not really present. Like he doesn't belong here, like he never did. Like her.

“Were we boring you?” Joanna’s eyebrows travel to her hairline. Rey can tell she’s trying her hardest to plaster on an icy facade in front of Kylo, but there are obvious signs hinting at her telltale rage: the white, widened nostrils, the darkening eyes, the way her right fingers play with those of her left. There used to be a wedding ring there, but now there’s only a strip of bleached white where the rest of the skin had tanned around the jewelry, reminder of a failed relationship.

“Nope, sorry.” Rey straightens in her chair and the notebook goes sliding down her lap, pages catching on her left ankle. “I’m so sorry. What is — ?”

“Mr. Ren would like to speak with you,” Joanna says stiffly, flashing him a coy smile. Kylo smiles back at her, all bright, open teeth and wide lips. Something black and hollow opens up in Rey’s chest. She supposes it was only a matter of time. Not many men are able to resist Joanna, especially when she’s decided she wants one in particular. 

“OK.”

“He’d like to speak with you back at the bar,” Joanna clarifies, her stupid smile widening. “He called and said it was a matter of importance. Of course, I told him it was no problem at all, that you could leave the staff meeting early.”

“But why did he come all the way uptown —”

“Oh my god. Just. Go,” Joanna sighs, her nostrils impossibly wide, her tone hinting that Rey is moronic for not _just going_ when a hot man tells her to _go_.

“I’m so sorry to have caused any trouble,” Kylo breaks in smoothly, his face a study in apology. “I promise I would never have come and disrupted things unless this was of the utmost importance.”

Fifty pairs of female eyes swivel to fixate on him with laser-focus intensity. Fifty faces forgive him instantly. Fifty pouty, lined lips sigh imperceptibly. _If only_. 

Rey shrugs back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest, unimpressed.

———-

Once outside the office, blinking in a swatch of harsh sunlight, Kylo is careful to skirt towards the shade. He’s not really in the mood to explain his absence of a shadow, at least right now, anyway — but he shouldn’t have worried. Rey is fixated on nothing beyond her own annoyance.

“What is it with you?” She snarls, her hazel eyes narrowed into slits.

“Excuse me?”

“Why can’t you ever just text or call me on the phone, like a normal client? Most of my coworkers have weekly calls you know, where they talk through things like status agendas and upcoming events. Oh no, but not _us_. No, because _you_ always cryptically insist that I come over to your bar, where you stare at me, and make me feel...” She doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, her face reddens, and she bites off the end of her words, throwing her hands in the air. “Oh, and let’s not forget the part where I get shot! Where was I when that happened? Uh, oh yeah — your fucking bar, that’s where!”

A cab with a topper advertising Lime-a-Rita’s newest pineapple flavor (“just in time for summer!”) comes racing around the corner, and Kylo pulls Rey back onto the sidewalk before she becomes another casualty of the NYC pedestrian scene. She doesn't say thank you. Overhead, the sun is a blaze of blurry yellow and white. This close to Times Square, the streets are thronged with people. Everything smells overripe, the heat amplifying the stench of congestion and body odor, thickening the rich, milky swill of half empty milkshake cups littering the trash cans. When they descend into the subway, the humidity hits like a battering ram, like an actual wall, like something alive and malevolent, determined to suffocate. It would feel like Hell, except that Kylo knows with awful, perfect certainty, this is the opposite of Hell. Hell is a frozen wasteland. Dante got that much right, at least. 

Elsewhere on the platform, pedestrians are visibly sweating, fanning themselves with anything they can get their hands on, but Kylo is physically incapable of sweating. When he glances over at Rey, there’s no visible perspiration on her forehead either, even though she’s wearing black jeans in 100 degree heat.

“What do I make you feel?” Kylo pushes. The clock above them says the next train will arrive in five minutes.

“Of course, you’d pick up on _that_ part of what I said, you asshole.” Rey looks away from him and drums her fingertips lightly against her thighs. Her gaze bores into the black tunnel behind them, searching for headlights.

Today, Rey is wearing a tiny, brown T-shirt that’s sticking to her body in distracting ways, and skin-tight black zippered jeans with the knees ripped out. The mold and shape of the T-shirt around her chest, and the sliver of exposed skin between her ass and lower back fills Kylo with a hard, aching lust. He sighs gustily. 

“Look,” he tries for patience, something he’s never been good at. “I want to talk to you about something, and it’s important, so I’d rather do it privately. The bar is the most private place I can think of.”

“And what can possibly be so important?” Rey snaps back acidly. 

Kylo bites his lip. He can’t bleed, so all he tastes is bloodless, rubber flesh between his teeth. “I want to talk to you about you. About who you are. Where you come from.”

Rey doesn’t look at him, but he can tell he’s startled the anger right out of her. The clock counts down steadily; three minutes until the next train. A rat scurries onto the tracks, pawing through a congealed mess of liquid spill. Only in New York City are the rats this obscenely large. “I’m from Kentucky.”

“You know what I mean,” Kylo says, his voice pitched low, so low, it’s almost imperceptible. “There’s something different about you. You’re able to do things you can’t quite explain away. Have you even thought about how you were able to survive two bullets that should have killed you in minutes?”

Finally, Rey does look at him. The way she looks at him makes him feel see-through, his veneer chipped away. He wonders if she sees blood and organs when she looks at him, or if she sees all the things he’s done wrong. He does, anyway. When he closes his eyes he sees himself, falling and falling in an endless loop, the sky on fire, broken wings beating uselessly, blood everywhere. 

_Father forgive me, for I have sinned_.

“You’re special, Rey.”

She snorts. “Is that a pickup line? Because, you know I have a —”

“Fiancé, yes.” He closes his eyes. The word crunches underneath his teeth. “Yes, Rey. I’m aware.”

“So you genuinely mean that, then? You think I’m special?” 

The question of it curves into a baited hook, but he is falling for it anyway, even though he knows better. Her voice is bleeding. He cracks open one eye and looks at her, the only person in his long, long life to ever try to actually _save_ him, his Rey — heartbreakingly beautiful, ridiculously brave, stupidly talented, and still her face is full of a fierce uncertainty. His flesh is fire. He tells her the truth. “You’re the most special person I’ve ever known.”

Something slips behind her eyes, a defense cracking open. Her pupils dilate. Her fingertips, brushing against his, are not an accident. He leans in. 

The train hurtles down the tracks, spewing dirty air and condensation in its wake. Kylo steps back reflexively, his hand still _almost-not-quite-touching_ Rey’s. His skin is tingling with the absence and simultaneous nearness of it. He wants her so badly, it is a sour taste in his mouth. _Fuck_ , he thinks. He wants to know how she tastes, how her body would feel underneath his. _God_ , he thinks, desperately, futilely, then immediately catches himself and swallows down the blasphemy of his thoughts. God does make deals with sinners like him. 

The train doors open smoothly. An empty compartment. The rush of air conditioning feels like a balm across Kylo’s skin. They’re followed in by a man in a low brim hat, wearing baggy jeans that look to have been organically ripped (rather than purchased that way for effect) and haphazardly patched in places, coupled with steel toed boots. 

_That’s weird_ , Kylo thinks, the thought floating briefly through his mind.The train jerks into motion. He sits down, Rey sliding down next to him. He looks at her again, at her flushed cheeks, her full, pink lips — _fuck all_. She’s not looking at him. Instead, head cocked, eyes squinted, she’s looking at the man in the low brim hat sitting across from them, his eyes completely obscured, his face turned towards the floor. Kylo follows her gaze, focusing his senses. 

The cold slams into him like a storm; he’s shaking with the sudden intensity of it, freezing as though he were standing in a puddle of ice water with the wind blowing. It’s the kind of cold that has a presence, that grows teeth and claws and a yawning, howling throat, and Kylo is _cold_ , he’s so fucking cold. The cold thunders in his ears and he _knows_ suddenly, knows what he should have known all along, if he hadn’t been so distracted by Rey. 

The train stutters to a halt, somewhere in between Times Square and Bryant Park. The man lifts his head, grinning. His eyes are red, the way no humans’ eyes ever should be. He launches himself across the compartment, straight at Rey.

———-

Rey shrieks aloud as the deranged man lunges at her, but suddenly Kylo’s in front of her, meeting him head on, and the air shudders with the sounds of flesh on flesh. For the homeless man Rey had first assumed him to be, the strange assailant moves with a sort of inhuman grace, the same way — her mouth dries up, watching them — the same way that Kylo moves.

He comes at Kylo so fast that he looks like a painted blur of light, and even as Kylo leaps aside, Rey is still seeing spots of light in her vision. The air around them shimmers. Suddenly, Rey isn’t seeing a man anymore. The human face melts away to reveal a twisted mass of blue skin, with yellow pits for eyes and jagged points for front teeth. 

_Holy fucking hell_. Rey screams again, louder, and the creature whips his head towards her, the mouth transforming in a grimace of pleasure at her obvious fear.

“Rey! No!”

The creature leaps, whip crack fast, the hard, heavy weight of him sending her skidding brutally backwards. Rey falls, her head hitting the floor with a sickening thump. She scrabbles with her fingertips for purchase, ripping off nails in the process. He’s on top of her now. She can feel his hot breath slither repulsively across her skin, and then a burning, razor sharp pain explodes in her left shoulder. _Teeth_. Fangs, biting, tearing. Obscene warmth spills across her shoulder blades. _Dear god, not again_. There’s a kind of terrible irony in surviving bullet wounds, only to be ripped apart on a New York subway car by the kind of creature horror stories are made of. Rey thinks of the beasts she’d drawn in her latest graphic novel and wonders if this is a dream, if this is her story come to life. Though by all accounts, it feels real. If something can kill you, and you can kill it — that makes it real by definition, doesn’t it?

The creature is pulled off of her, and she gulps air greedily, staring at the ceiling. A spot of mold leaks ugly puss around a black, fuzzy center. Blood is pooling everywhere, mixing with dirt. Her shoulder throbs with a pain that runs bone deep.

Kylo’s shriek of pain jolts her back to reality. She drags herself to a sitting position and sees Kylo on his knees, blood fountaining around his waist, his eyes desperate, locked upon his wound in abject terror. A memory clicks in her skull: Kylo, back at the bar, when a glass had slipped between his fingers. She’d been prepared for the violence of spliced skin, for the coppery, acrid scent of blood — but his palm had been unmarred. Back then, he’d try to play it off as something she’d imagined, given all the wine they’d been drinking, but now she knows better. Somehow, Kylo can't … _doesn’t_ bleed. Not like humans do, anyway. So what does it mean now, that he is dripping blood all over a train compartment?

His eyes moves to hers, his gaze fusing the air between them; he smiles at her and it's horrible because awareness is blooming within her like a sick, misshapen flower. They're going to die. The truth of it is written all over Kylo’s face, bursting from his eyes, dripping from his pores. _He loves her_. Rey can see it now, see everything he’s held back from her. Now, in this final moment, he wants her to know. _He loves her_. She feels the power, the intensity of it, in a way that she’s never felt anything before. 

The creature advances, mouth bared, his teeth bone-white, sharper than anything should have the right to be. 

And something in Rey snaps. Deep in her soul, she feels this crack occur, all the brittle hardness within her shattering into dust. All the anger and resentment and self-loathing she’s carried from childhood crumbles into nothing. Every instance that she’d cried alone in her bedroom, wondering why no one loved her, every time that she’d staggered into school, half-buried under the weight of a gargantuan backpack, pretending not to hear while her classmates sniggered and pointed, every second of raw pain underneath Mike’s fists, every reflection she’d ever seen in the mirror that stared back and told her she was _not normal_ — everything crystallizes into this one, cold moment of perfect awareness.

Rey is calm. “Hey, you.” She gestures to the creature. It cocks its head, a strangely human gesture. 

“Yeah, you. Motherfucker.”

It snarls, low and deep in its throat.

“I’m the one you want, right? Not him. So come and get me.”

Kylo is yelling at her, but she isn’t listening. Her mind empties, only aware of the creature’s movements as it twists towards her, mouth bared. 

Blue fire flares from her fingertips, the force of it filling the compartment, the electricity of it short-circuiting the lights. 

She incinerates the fucker in mid-air.


	9. Chapter 9

A memory:

The first time Rey Kenobi lays eyes on Mike Peirano, she is out at Mercury Lounge, drinking a gin and tonic and watching the Strokes perform _Reptilia_. 

He’s sitting four barstools down from her, throwing back shots of Fireball. It’s the middle of February, and outside, everything is cold and dark and dead, smashed up slush and grey snow lying dormant across the world like broken, discarded tinsel. Everyone’s huddled up in heavy winter gear, nursing spiked cider in between fingerless-gloved hands — but Mike only has a studded leather jacket shrugged around a grey T-Shirt. He wears it loosely, unzipped, like casual armor, like he’s daring winter to take him on, like he’s impervious to the cold. 

When he orders another drink, he looks at Rey, not the bartender. She looks away, blushing fiercely. He takes the shot, throwing back his head, the tendons pulsing in his neck. The Strokes start playing _Heart in a Cage_ to heavy applause. 

Then he comes over to her, pushing past people, heavy boots scuffing against the floor. Rey’s blush fades in the wake of instant wariness. He is looking at her like he wants to kiss her, like it is his absolute right, like he already knows how it would feel. 

“Hi,” he says, “Has anyone ever told you before that you’re beautiful? Because you are, you know.”

Uncomfortable, Rey curls her fingers around her drink, condensation beading her fingers. “Do you always come on this strong?”

He grins. “Only when I really want something.”

 _Something_ , he’d called her, _not someone_. 

When he leans in and brushes a fingertip down her arm, her whole body sparks, a live wire of electric current zinging between them. The faintest smell of singed flesh pierces the air. Mike withdraws his hand like he’s been burned, and maybe he has — because even in the darkness, Rey can see the tiny, white blisters on his index finger.

“Ow,” he says, more startled than hurt, “Did you feel that? What the fuck was that?”

“Nothing,” Rey lies. “I didn’t feel anything.”

Throughout the course of her life to date, there have been a myriad instances pointing to the fact she is something more than purely human. But this visible flash of electricity that jumps between her skin and Mike’s is the catalyst that tells her just how _other_ she really is.

And she rejects it.

In this moment, she _knows_ she’s something strange, but she willfully _unknows_ it too — because she craves normalcy, because her whole childhood has been a saga of death and upheaval and stories of strange angelic beings. She doesn’t want these things; she didn’t ask for them. Right now, all she wants is to be a normal girl in a bar, listening to an alt-rock band croon about hearts trapped behind bars, flirting with a cute guy who calls her _beautiful_.

———-

Fast forward six months. Press play.

_Mike’s fists on her face. The world, a blurry swirl of grey, tilting above her. Her left eye is swollen shut, crusted with something warm and wet. She inhales deeply through wounded lungs, desperately trying to access that deep, ancient part of her, and, and —_

_And nothing. Her power’s gone. Because she’d rejected it, apparently burying it down somewhere so deep that she can’t uncover it, not even now, in her time of need._

_She closes her one working eye and exhales slowly._

__

———-

While the thought of her own death hadn’t been enough to coax forth her powers — the fear of _Kylo’s_ death was a different matter entirely.

———-

Rey’s hands are shaking violently. They won’t stop twitching, not even when Kylo crouches down in front of her and presses her left hand between both of palms.

His skin is cool and rough and caked with dried blood. She stares at the black flakes of skin trapped underneath his left thumbnail because she doesn’t know where else to look. The train grinds into gear, finally moving, as if the death of a demon was all that was needed to coax it into motion.

“Sweetheart,” Kylo whispers to her, his voice low and gritty, a mixture of gravel and silk. “It’s OK. I promise it will be OK.”

“What was _that_? What is happening?” She manages to get out.

“I’ll tell you. I’ll you everything when we get home. OK?”

Rey shakes her head in a jerky approximation of a nod. They get off together at the next stop, even though it’s not close to where they want to go, and no one on the platform gives them much of a second look, even though Rey’s shoulder is oozing blood through her T-shirt, and the wound around Kylo’s waist has congealed into viscous liquid that seeps steadily through his black shirt. (This is New York City after all, where no one pays any attention to anyone, because the best way to survive is to keep your head down and your elbows out. Look around wide-eyed, initiate too much conversation — and the city will swallow you whole and spit you back out, half chewed up around the edges.)

———-

They walk up the subway stairs, their arms looped around each other for support, this man who fell from heaven, and this girl who is not quite human and not quite angel, but something altogether _other_ — and they turn their faces towards the sunlight.

———-

When they get to the bar, Kylo immediately takes her upstairs, to his apartment on the floor above. Unlike the decor at _Heaven and Hell_ , there is no black marbling and no proliferation of angel motifs here. Kylo’s apartment is spare in nature, with a squashed sofa pushed to the far side of one wall, in front of a giant HD screen that gleams dully in the absence of light. Peeling rock band posters decorate the walls. Rey pauses in front of Johnny Cash flipping off the camera, and blinks, surprised. “I didn’t know you liked the man in black.”

“Where do you think I got my sense of style from?” Kylo jokes, his back to her as he rummages through the kitchen cabinets. 

“Huh.” It’s weird to think of Kylo taking cues from anyone other than himself; she imagines that he has always just been the same, steady and solid, an island unto himself. He turns sharply, a fluted glass in his hand, full of amber liquid and topped with an orange garnish, sliced into razor thin filaments of pulp. “Drink?”

“Sure. That would be great, thanks.”

Beneath the stilted, superficial conversation, the tension in the room thickens, underlaid with the horror that was this afternoon’s train ride. Rey’s eyes drift to Kylo’s waist where the blood has matted into thick black swirls. “How’s your —”

“— Shoulder?” he finishes.

She takes a sip of the drink. It’s strong and bitter, until she swallows it, and then the liquid turns sweet where it clings to her throat, syrupy and heavy, like fruit juice. “It’s fine. Honestly, it really doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

Kylo frowns. Leaning forward, he peels back the thin cotton of the T-shirt across her shoulders. Rey shivers — she’s dreamt of this, his fingers on her skin, caressing her like this; she wants to arch into his touch, but his eyes are cool and assessing, focused only on her wound. It’s no longer bleeding freely. The creature’s teeth had sliced through her skin like paper, ribboning it into slashes that are already beginning to close up. “I guess we can add fast healer to my existing list of strange attributes, right?” She jokes, grasping at levity, but Kylo only leans backward and smiles a smile that isn’t a smile at all, more like a grimace of pain.

“Do you think …” She takes another big sip for courage, and then halfway through swallowing thinks _fuck it_ , and downs the whole thing in huge, measured gulps, the alcohol sliding down her throat, the bitter-sweetness making the backs of her teeth ache. “Is there any chance … you know what that _thing_ was? Do you know what I am?”

Kylo looks at her. Just looks. His gaze is like heat, like a hand over hers, a gentle squeeze. She feels it like an actual knuckle brush across her cheekbones, and then it makes her remember how he looked at her in the train, with the creature between them and the light of the whole world in his eyes. _Had Finn ever once looked at her like that?_ She struggles to recall a time when he had, and comes up short.

“I'll tell you what thing was. And no, I don't know what you are...”

She exhales sharply. 

“But I can help you find out.”

Her gaze flickers to Kylo’s. “You’d do that for me?”

His expression tells her there’s little he wouldn’t do for her. Her heart lurches. “Was that what you’d originally wanted to talk to me about? You knew there was something strange about me?”

“Sort of.” Kylo’s mouth twists. “But mainly, I wanted to tell you the truth about me. I wanted you to know that there was something strange about _me_.”

———-

Of the many wonderful things about Rey, one of them is that she doesn’t faze easily. At his words, she merely sits down, straight backed on his sofa, and expectantly folds her hands in her lap. Kylo’s throat seizes, watching her. _What if this is the moment she decides to leave, to walk out of his life and never come back?_

He’d already wrestled with this agony. Hours before a blue-skinned demon had jumped at Rey in the subway, he’d taken a train to midtown with the full intention of telling her everything about himself — no matter what, and fuck all possible consequences — because he’d decided he couldn’t bear lying to her any longer. This girl with literal fire in her veins had somehow found a way to punch through his numb exterior and touch him in a red, raw place he hadn’t known existed. 

“I’m an angel. A Fallen.”

A beat. Rey arches an eyebrow, her tone heavy with sarcasm. “OK, sure. So where are your wings then?”

Kylo looks at the stitching on the sofa and decides he needs a drink. He doesn’t even bother with a mixer, just downs the whiskey neat and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He sets down the glass on the table in front of the sofa and takes off his shirt in one swift motion.

“They used to be here,” he tells her, pointing to the space between his shoulder blades, “but that was before they were ripped off, as punishment for my sins.”

He hears her sharp intake of breath, and then her hands are on his skin, tracing the grooves of his flesh, examining the scars cut into his body that haven’t healed and never will. Her index finger probes gently, an edge of ragged nail digging into his back, and he shivers. When he sleeps with girls, he doesn’t take his shirt off. That’s one of his cardinal rules, along with others like, _never stay the night_ and _absolutely no showering together post coitus_. Those things imply intimacy, but beyond that, he has no desire to bear his scars in front of any female. Until now, apparently. 

“Fuck, Kylo,” Rey whispers, and she lingers on the _ck_ sound, sharpening the word between her teeth. “My god. What happened to you?”

He feels naked and vulnerable. Defensive, he reaches for his shirt, but she won’t let him. Her hands catch his, interlocking his fingers between hers, and the sudden friction of the skin-on-skin contact makes him dizzy. She says, “Don’t hide from me. Don’t be afraid.”

Kylo blinks; for a long minute he can’t speak. “In Heaven as on Earth,” he tells Rey, “there is one main rule. Love the Lord your God above all else, with all your soul, all your heart and all your mind. And there is a second rule too: thine will, not mine, be done. I broke both of those rules during my first period of time on Earth.”

“What were you doing on Earth?”

Kylo blows out a huge breath. There is a yellow tint to Rey’s eyes, the sheen of reflected lamplight, making him think of a wild animal at night. “I was charged with overseeing the last moments of the dying.”

Her face is full of something, not pity exactly, but an emotion full of edges and angles, indecipherable, and impossible to pin down. “That must have been … awful.”

“It was,” he agrees easily, “but there were good moments too. There’s a common belief that the last, most desperate moments of a lifetime only bring out the worst in people. But sometimes they bring out the best too.” _Like Mrs. Lewandowski, smiling on her deathbed, as she felt the presence of her son’s soul in the hospital room with her. And Leslie, fading away on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the whole sky in her eyes._

He swallows down the heaviness in his throat. Rey asks, “Why were your wings torn off?”

“I told you.”

“No. You only said you broke the rules. How exactly?”

Kylo rocks back and forth in place, then pours himself another shot. When he swallows and leans back against the couch, Rey grabs his arm and steadies him. She hasn’t ever touched him this much before. Normally, he’s the one reaching and she’s the one retreating, but he could get used to this new dynamic. Her fingers move from the underside of his wrist to his elbow, following the path of thready purple veins. “I fell in love,” he confesses.

Something very hurt and very human clouds her eyes. Seeing this, Kylo’s mouth fills with reassurances, _it was nothing like this, nothing like what I feel for you_ , but he doesn’t want to scare her away, not with Finn’s ghost dancing in the space between them. “I saved her life,” Kylo says instead, “she was scheduled to die but I saved her. I disobeyed the rules.”

“Where is she now? Why aren’t you with her?”

“Because when I went to find her, she was with another man.” Kylo’s voice is steady. He waits to feel the familiar rush of pain from that dark bend of his life, but there is nothing. Now, it is only something that happened to him, once upon a time. He cocks his head at Rey. “You’re taking all of this very well. None of this fazing you?”

Rey chews on a thumbnail. It cracks between her teeth. “I’m good with weird. I’ve been weird my whole life. I always knew it .. I just didn’t want to face it I guess. My mother —”

“Your mother, what?”

“Nothing.” She breaks his gaze. “So you don’t know what I am? You don’t think I’m an angel?”

“Maybe partly.” Kylo is hesitant to tell her that the powers she displayed on the train weren’t typical of an angelic being. He knows that blue fire, and the ability to wield it, is a cursed power. It belongs to Hell, not that he’d tell her this. “But that’s a topic for another time. This is a lot to take in.”

“Then that … thing on the train, that was a demon?”

“Yes.”

“Why was it trying to kill me?” she demands.

Kylo chews at his bottom lip. “Sometimes demons don’t need a reason to be vicious. It’s part of their nature.”

She bypasses this information without processing it. “And was Eric, the one who shot me at the party, was he a demon too?”

This is an easier question. “No, he was human.” Kylo remembers tearing Eric apart, remembers the warm rush of red blood, the way his bones had popped and cracked in all the fragile ways that mortal bodies did. 

Rey is silent for a moment, considering. “Maybe a demon hired Eric to take out a hit on me? Maybe some demon down in the bowels of hell wants me dead because … of what am?” 

Kylo sighs heavily. His reflection in the glass above the kitchen cabinets stares back at him, the skin under his eyes purpling, bruised like old fruit. He looks tired. He _is_ tired. “I don’t think anyone wants you dead. I think it’s a case of demons being demons. But you don’t have to worry about any of that right now. I’ll keep you safe.”

Her nostrils flare; she clearly resents this, but doesn’t contest it. “Do you think I could maybe take a shower before I go home?”

“Of course.” 

Kylo stands up, his hand on the small of her lower back, feeling the heat of her pulse through the thin fabric of the T-Shirt. “The bathroom’s just down the hall on the left.” 

He watches her walk away from him, waiting as her footfalls grow fainter, waiting until she’s really gone, listening for the sound of splashing water. Only then does he pull out his phone.

Hux answers on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hux,” Kylo snarls, “We have a serious problem.”

———-

The shower is enormous. Blue and white mosaic tiles comprise waves that swirl across the floor beneath her feet, and she has trouble with the temperature, given the plethora of nozzle heads.

Rey scrubs the blood from her hair with lukewarm water and examines her shoulder, now only a series of pale pink, puckered lines. Her head is spinning. _Angels. Demons._ It reminds her of a quote from Shakespeare’s _Tempest — hell is empty, and all the devils are here._

She wonders why she isn’t more scared. Shouldn’t she be? But it’s as if this is already old information, something she’s instinctively known her whole life but has never faced. She thinks of the radiant being that had apparently visited her mother during pregnancy, and of her own graphic novels, of all the demons she’s been drawing since before she knew what a demon could look like. She shudders, spraying shampoo and water against the walls. The way that blue skinned _thing_ had leapt at her — with eye teeth bared and forked tongue flickering —is forever immortalized in her mind. 

Rey reaches for the conditioner. There are no feminine options, nothing flowery and sweet, but she unearths a bottle of Jack Black behind the soap and sniffs gingerly. _Tea tree._ It'll do. 

Lathering the ends of her hair, she hopes that Kylo’s information will finally allow her to step into who she really is, rather than continue to bemoan all her … abnormalities. How many times in her life to date has she prayed for normalcy? 

But she isn’t normal, and neither is Kylo. Better to accept it now.

———-

“What do you mean, you _bled_?” Hux’s voice is full of growling syntax, underlaid with harsh syllables, which is how he always sounds when he’s worried about Kylo. “You can’t bleed. _We_ can’t bleed. Not even in death. We simply expire.”

Pacing around the kitchen, Kylo palms the glasses from the table and drops them in the sink. The rind of an orange peel bobs obstinately in the last drop of liquid. “I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? But I’m telling you the facts, since you’re not here to see the bloody mess that used to be my waist!”

Hux is silent for a long moment. “Where are you now?”

“My apartment. With Rey.”

“Hmm.” Hux’s voice lowers in volume, his tone becoming clipped and thoughtful. “Have you considered the fact that the girl may be having some physical impact upon you?”

Kylo’s heart is beating in his eardrums, drowning out rational thought. “That’s not ….” His clenched fist turns white, depleting blood from his brain, and he forces himself to take a breath. “We can discuss this later. Speaking of Rey though, I need you to keep an eye on her for me. After the demon attack in the subway today, I don’t want to take any chances. You’re the best tracker I know.”

“The _only_ tracker you know, you mean,” Hux’s response is wry. “Consider it done.”

“Thank you.” Kylo tries to put a lot of unspoken emotion into that _thank you_ , like how he feels about Rey and how lucky he is to have a friend like Hux that he can talk to, and maybe Hux understands, because his voice is gruffer than usual when he replies, “Kylo, that’s what I’m here for.”

The sound of running water abruptly shuts off. Kylo’s head snaps up. “I have to go.”

Hux hangs up without saying goodbye, and Kylo lurches against the countertop. Outside the windows, dusk is falling across Manhattan, dappling his apartment with neon shades of color. He leans into his hands, considering. What Hux had said about Rey’s powers … Kylo thought it was just demon poison affecting him. He doesn’t want to consider the alternative that Rey could be causing him to bleed.

A reflection of light forces his eyes downwards. Gleaming amidst the white enamel of the sink is a serrated knife. Kylo stares at it and it stares resolutely back, both of them interested in what the other has to offer.

“Kylo?”

Whip crack fast, Kylo reaches for the knife, concealing it behind his back with one hand just as Rey exits the bathroom. She’s wearing the same brown T, the same ripped black jeans as before, but somehow she looks different, like the air is holding its breath around her. Her hair is damp, her face scrubbed clean, making her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones higher. Kylo has always thought her to be beautiful, but it hits him especially hard now, the piercing way she flicks those hazel eyes at him, like a girl toying with a sharp knife, ready to cut his heart out. 

Behind his back, the blade twitches in his hand. 

“Hey. I just wanted to say thank you for everything,” her smile is self conscious, violently at odds with the rampant power that pulses in her skin, “Thank you for explaining things to me, for taking care of me. I know our situation is complicated, but I want you to know that I feel … vulnerable around you. In the best way.” 

Kylo blinks. Hands behind his back, he draws the blade across his palm, feeling it cut across the fragile skin, biting through the network of blue veins underneath. The pain explodes in a red, viscous cloud behind his eyes, just as something warm and wet blooms in his hand. He clenches his fist around the wound and breathes into the pain. “It would appear that you make me … vulnerable too.”

———-

Rey is sketching when Finn comes home, three hours later. He bends down and kisses her on the shoulder. “Hey babe. How was your day?”

Rey keeps her eyes on the page. The demon in black and white charcoal leers up at her, kinetic energy rippling in the muscles of its legs. 

“Fine. Uneventful.”

———-

At work the next day, Rey responds to two finance related emails, then spends an hour scrolling through pages devoted to fallen angel lore. _In the Abrahamic religions_ , she reads, _they are former agents of God, and the enemies of humanity_.

“What are you reading? Angels? What is this shit?” Rachel is peering over Rey’s shoulder, her brow furrowed. Rey exits the webpage so fast she knocks over a half cup of coffee sitting next to her keyboard.

“Nothing. Research for the _Heaven and Hell_ client.”

Rachel only shrugs, jerking her head towards the coffee spill. Her expression is skeptical. “Need a hand with that?” 

“I got it, thanks.” Rey unearths paper towels from her bottom desk drawer. Her web browser history is so fucked. She probably shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing at work anyway. 

The sound of her desk phone ringing startles her and she jerks reflexively, hitting her head on the edge of the desk. Swearing under his breath, wringing coffee from her hands, she presses the phone to her ear. “Yes, hello?”

“Rey Kenobi? You have a visitor at the front desk.”

Rey cradles the phone with her shoulder blade, mopping up the coffee spill. “Can you please tell Kylo I’m busy at the moment?”

“It’s not Mr. Ren.”

“Finn then. Tell Finn I’ll talk to him at home; I can’t right this minute.”

“It’s not Finn either.”

“Who is it?”

The voice at the other end is silent for a long moment. Then, “I think you’d better come down and see for yourself.”

Rey hurls down the phone and stalks to the elevator from her seat. She doesn’t have time for this kind of nonsense. She has too much going on to entertain … random visitors or prospective clients, or salesman looking to invite her to PR Week conferences. The elevator pings to her floor and she jabs angrily at the _lobby_ button, crossing her arms at her reflection in the glass doors.

The elevator jerks downwards. The doors open. Rey halts in place.

Her first thought is … _he’s beautiful_. Her second thought is … _he’s not human_. She doesn’t know how she knows this; she simply does. This man carries with him the same aura that Kylo does. 

Rey walks up to him. She can smell something heavy and damp on him, like the smell of the sky before a storm. He's standing still, violent energy ripples the air around him. She blinks up at him, and he blinks down at her, his golden eyes set against the sharpest cheekbones she's ever seen. Actually — she’s seen those eyes before, in a dream. _A girl, crouched underneath a plastic lawn table, looking up at a boy, his gold-slitted eyes jutting above the blue-purple shadows of his cheekbones_. 

Rey catches her breath. The man smiles at her. 

“Hello Rey,” he whispers, “No hug for your father, after all these years?”


	10. Chapter 10

This close to him, the smell is stronger in her nostrils, a sickly braid of dirt, full of rain and damp earth and everything that crawls. Inhaling sharply, Rey is transported to a forest floor, where she’s lying on her back, stunned, all the wind kicked out of her. 

“My …” she chokes. Her chest is all breath.

He … it watches her flatly, head cocked, reptilian eyes narrowed.

“I thought I told you to stay away from me.” Fists clenched, nails making grooves into her palm, it is the only thing she can manage. She still remembers the phone call two years ago. It had been June, the world full of bright flame and blue color, and Van Leeuwen’s had just opened on the Upper West Side. Her mouth had been full of salted caramel, fast-melting drops flecking her chin, when her phone shrilled.

_Static electricity, jumping between the phone and the hard point of her shoulder blade. A hissing in her ear. “Rey? This is your father. I’ve been looking for you for a very, very long time.”_

It was hot outside, but suddenly she was cold, ice replacing the blood in her veins, a freezing wind whipping through her hair, goosebumps prickling the bare skin of her arms.

“No,” she’d replied thickly, swallowing down a pool of ice cream. “No fucking way in hell. You don’t get to crawl your way back into my life now, more than twenty years later. You missed your chance to be my dad. I’m not interested.”

Now, Rey wishes she’d worn lipstick, or her hair in a chignon, or heels, or some sort of _armor_ to face the man who’d abandoned her … anything other than a wrinkled blouse from a night spent at the bottom of her laundry hamper.

The man, _creature_ — she refuses to think of him as her father — only blinks, undeterred. “And I did stay away,” he counters, “For two years I honored your wishes, but now I cannot stay away any longer. Please, let me explain.”

“No,” Rey backs away, “Why should I trust you? You abandoned me. Did you even love my mother? Did you love me?”

For a moment, he looks cold and strange, and then the expression slides away, and he just looks tired. “Please. Let me explain. Would you go to get coffee with me?”

“Coffee?” She jerks back, cringing from his offer. The line between worlds is apparently threaded so thinly that supernatural beings think nothing of inviting estranged daughters to Starbucks for frappuccino runs. “Why would I go anywhere with you when you’ve been sending demons to try and kill me?”

It’s a stretch, but she’s gratified to see his face twist. The blue-black shadows morph under his eyes, taking on the shape of bruises, and the gold limning his pupils sharpens. He reaches out to the wall, a very human gesture, like he’s steadying himself — except that frost spreads out from his fingertips, painting the plaster in translucent ice whorls. Rey stares blankly at one of the concentric circles, her capacity for shock long exhausted by now.

“I did not send anyone to kill you. I thought that the lesser demons might seek you out,” her father says, and his voice is full of the kind of deep blackness that drapes rural roads in the wintertime, “which is why I intended to find you first. To protect you. It would have been easier if you’d just let me come to you.”

Rey blinks. The tips of her father’s fingertips are raw and white. When she looks down at her own hands, she remembers blue fire crackling from her skin like lightning. Her whole life, she’s been dogged by a sense of pressure, a heaviness pulsing underneath her skin. Strange things. Static electricity jumping between her body and other people’s. When she was younger, she’d press her fingers to her face in the mirror, wondering why she looked so differently on the outside to the way she felt on the inside. 

She says it like a statement instead of a question, “You know what I am.” 

Her father half smiles. She can see the tips of his teeth, overcrowded in the back of his mouth, filed to sharpened points. His mouth is blood red, like how she imagines the bowels of Hell must look. “I know what you are.”

———-

Her father opts to go to _Balthazar’s_ , which is all the way downtown, on Spring Street. He pushes around a bacon-and-leek quiche, impaling it with his fork and watching the cheese crumble, while Rey devours three eggs sunny side in a haze of fear and anticipation.

Then her father tells her a story. It goes like this.

———-

_Once upon a time, there was a war._

_It was not a war in the way you might think about wars. There were no flags or machine guns or grimy fatigues or army bases or POWs._

_This was a war of worlds._

_The Fallen joined forces with the demons, and they were a formidable army, far stronger together than they ever could have been apart, with their unique mix of lightness and dark. Even cast out of heaven, the Fallen still carried heaven in their veins, while the demons wielded the blue lightning that was so characteristic of their kind, with devastating force._

_United together, they waged war against God and his angelic cohorts — with the goal of securing a more democratic supernatural realm for themselves. Since the day that Lucifer first Fell, they’d viewed God as a dictatorial tyrant. Many of the Fallen had been cast out of heaven, not because of any actual wrongdoing on their part, but simply because their will had differed from God’s._

_They fought for a new world._

_Neither species could enter heaven, and so they waged a bloody, relentless reign of terror all across the earth. They razed empires in the blink of an eye: bricks to clay, blocks to sand and lime. They manipulated kings and coerced world rulers and tortured prophets and raped innocents. Picture blood in the streets - a rapid, red flow of it - that was what it was like. Kingdoms dissolved into dust. Whole centuries of history disappeared in less time than it takes to snap your fingers. And the terror on earth was so absolute and so horrific that maybe God would have finally given into their demands …_

_… had it not been for the rallying of the angelic forces._

_The Archangels came in droves._

_It wasn’t like in the Sunday school stories, where they were just and mighty and kind. If anything, the angels were even more vicious than the demons. When they killed, they liked to make examples of their vengeance. They dismembered their enemies, stuck their heads on spikes and paraded them throughout the streets. They quartered the body parts of their Fallen brethren and hung them from the walled turrets of ancient cities. They laughed as their flaming swords tore demons apart and gloried in their last, desperate, agonized screams. In the cycle of the slaughter, revenge begat revenge until no one was quite sure which species had started the killing in the first place._

_Here is what happened._

_The angels won that war. And the angels would always win every war, no matter how many demonic insurrections there were, no matter how many numbers the demon forces amassed._

_Unless._

———-

“You,” Rey’s father tells her, inhaling his bacon-leek quiche with gusto, unperturbed by her stunned expression. “Unless you.”

“What do you mean, unless me?” Rey snaps. The remains of her eggs lie cooling on her plate. Stories of dead demons and bloodthirsty angels have driven the appetite straight out of her. She unearths her phone from the napkin buried in her lap, and types out a two sentence text, keeping her eyes on her father the entire time. “You’re insane, you know that? I don’t believe any of this — there are no such things as angels and demons, not really —”

“Bullshit,” says her father, the word barely audible. His mouth is full of bacon. He swallows deeply, dabs his mouth delicately and clarifies. “You already know the thing that attacked you in the train was a demon. You already know that your boyfriend is a Fallen. You already know that you’re not human; deep down, you’ve known that your whole life. Why are you bothering to deny any of it?”

Rey’s cheeks flame red, then drain of color. “Kylo’s not my boyfriend. I have a fiancé.”

“Oh.” Rey’s father takes a long, sensual swallow of his Bloody Mary. She hates the expression on his face. It’s the same expression that her colleagues wear when she explains that she and Kylo are just friends — except her father’s face is so stupidly perfect it looks like a template for skepticism, like something Michelangelo would carve in marble to showcase the symbolic beauty of the human form. “So you don’t feel anything for him?”

“Oh my god,” Rey says out loud, before realizing the irony of her words. “For heaven’s sake,” she tries again, realizing that isn’t any better. “I do not want to talk about this with you,” she hisses between clenched teeth. “Can we get back to what you were saying before about me being somehow pivotal in this whole supernatural war thing?”

“Right,” her father finishes downs the rest of his Bloody Mary and bares his teeth at her in a smile. Red droplets cling to his razor sharp back molars like drops of blood, portending violence. “You _are_ pivotal. You’re the weapon the angels never intended for us to make.”

“Us?”

“Demons,” her father shrugs, then gestures at himself with his fork. “I’m a greater demon. You are also part demon. I assumed you knew at least that much?”

The walls of _Balthazar’s_ start spinning. In her head, Rey has always been the heroine of her own story. She’s always had to fend for herself, and whether it was in the foster homes, or in the early days when she’d first come to New York and had to live in disgusting hole-in-the-walls up in Brooklyn Heights, blaring Van Halen at night so she didn’t have to hear the sounds the rats made in the walls — she’s always envisioned herself as someone _good_. Someone who would supersede her own shitty lot in life to fulfill her dreams so that one day she could tell other little lost girls, _don’t give up hope; good things can happen to you, too_.

The word _demon_ settles in her skin like an ugly wound. Razor blades churn in her gut. “I am not a demon,” she snarls. 

“No,” her father is calm, his eyes level with hers. “I said part demon. The whole point of that story is to show you that demons aren’t just evil and angels aren’t just good. Real life is more complicated than black and white binaries. What is it they say about morality again — shades of grey? Your boyfriend should prove that, if anything. By definition, the Fallen have defied God and so in their sin, they must be cast out of Heaven. But you wouldn’t call Kylo evil, would you?”

Rey hates herself for hesitating. She should be able to snap back _of course angels are good and demons are evil_ , but now she’s thinking of Kylo and his confession about why he’d Fallen. _I fell in love._ It’s such a deeply human, forgive-able thing he’d done. Godly love was perfect; it was the way God had first intended humans to love one another. But real life wasn’t like that. Humans loved each other in violent, desperate, passionate, agonizingly torturous ways. Sometimes love caused them to knife each other. Sometimes, when the people they loved didn’t love them back, they numbed themselves to the point of eventual overdose, lying lifeless in bathtubs with glazed eyes and open wrists, wondering if maybe oblivion would fix the hurt. 

To love imperfectly, to live brokenly, to feel intensely … it was so deeply human. _Shades of grey_.

“Ah,” her father looks up, gesturing at someone behind her. “In this case, would it be too ironic to say … speak of the devil? Kylo! Come join us.”

Kylo comes striding over to their table, his black hair damp like he just came out of the shower, his breath hot and fast. There’s a fleck of something on his chin. _Shaving cream or blood?_ Rey still wonders whether it’s normal for him to bleed. “I came as soon as I got your text.” His eyes are hot on her, questioning. “I would ask if everything’s OK, but Pan’s here talking you, so I’m going to assume not.”

He doesn’t wait for a hostess to seat him, just grabs a chair from the nearest table and pulls it close to Rey. When he reaches for her, she doesn’t think about the inappropriateness. She just grasps his hand blindly, desperate for the warmth of it. There’s no pulse, none that she can feel. But he squeezes, and sensation floods into her skin like a drug. Her nerve impulses go haywire. _This_ , she thinks, _I need it_. 

Across the table, her father wears an amused expression. “And you said you were just friends.”

It happens so fast Rey only registers a whirl of motion. One second the fork is just lying on her plate, still greasy with the remains of the scrambled eggs; the next second, it’s embedded in her father’s arm. 

Something jagged and dark glints in Kylo’s eyes. “You harm one hair on her head, this is how I’ll kill you,” he says. “With a goddamn, fucking fork. I’ll tie you down, use it to scrape all the skin from your body. And then I’ll use it to puncture your eyeballs, tear open your spleen,” his mouth curls. “I’ll watch you bleed out like a stuck pig, and I’ll fucking enjoy every second of it. So stay the _fuck_ away from her.”

Rey’s father wrenches the fork out of his skin. There’s no blood, just a tine-sized mark. 

“I take it you two already know each other,” Rey’s voice is soft as ash.

Her father’s expression doesn’t change. “Mostly by reputation. I imagine Kylo here never told you he was one of God’s favorite angels. Once upon a time, we used to run in similar social circles.”

Rey can feel the tension radiating through Kylo’s body. He still hasn’t let go of her hand. “Remember when I told you I was charged with overseeing the last moments of the dying? Well Pandemonium here killed a lot of people.”

Rey’s father, Pandemonium, tips his head in acknowledgement. “I was a younger demon there. Less mature. Greater appetite.”

Rey shivers. “I am _nothing_ like you,” she spits.

“Of course you’re not.” Kylo looks between her and Pandemonium. “And how do you two know each other?”

“He’s my father.”

“That’s a fucking lie.” Kylo’s whole body is rigid, his gaze fixed on Pandemonium. “Rey’s mother was human. You and I both know that when demons impregnate human women, the fetus always ends up killing them.” On the tabletop, his free hand clenches and unclenches, no doubt looking for something sharp.

Pandemonium nods. His face is sharper than Rey remembers seeing it before. Even as she stares, the air blurs around him, making him look momentarily insubstantial. Then she blinks and he looks solid again. “You’re right. Of course, it should have killed Rey’s mother long before she gave birth.” He smiles and it’s not a nice smile. It’s full of teeth and bite and a yawning, endless blackness. “It’s why we fed her angel blood to keep her alive. And that’s why I created you Rey,” he looks at his daughter, “the species that was never supposed to exist. The perfect, unexpected weapon in the war between heaven and hell: part demon, part angel, part _human_.”


End file.
